Thank you notes for all new users and contributors

[tobychui]

Recently, I am seeing a rising trend in user counts as well as developer interests into the Zoraxy project. First of all, I want to thanks everyone involved for testing and developing for Zoraxy. With all your helps, these contributions make Zoraxy a better piece of software. Please allow me to take this chances to share a bit about why Zoraxy exists and my view over this piece of software in general.

The Story of Zoraxy

This project was initially designed to provide a distributed reverse proxy service for my own DIY cluster, which is basically a few NUCs and Raspberry Pis in my university dorm room, my parents house and a few of my friend's places. We all hosts private servers like this and joint together using ZeroTier to provide some kind of area network for testing new self-host softwares. I really didn't expect this project to be known as a replacement of NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager) .

Why Zoraxy is named Zoraxy?

Zoraxy was originally a part of ArozOS, an open source web desktop and virtual file system layer / operating system for my distributed cluster for storing media files across many network nodes. In earlier version of ArozOS, there was a module named "Reverse Proxy" which helps expose other service running in ArozOS to the same web desktop using HTTP reverse proxy and virtual directories. Later on, as I want to extend my own websites with subdomains without installing ArozOS on the web server node, I split the Reverse Proxy from Aroz and make it a stand-alone project. That is where the Reverse(Aroz) Proxy, aka Zora-xy came from.

Why should I switch to Zoraxy?

You shouldn't. If you are comfortable with Caddy, NPM or any other reverse proxy server you are using, you should keep using it. A wise man once said, "If it works, don't touch it", Zoraxy by design, is trying to solve my (and other contributor's) problems. If you are having some different issues than our authors, you might not find this piece of software helpful or fitting your use cases. However, if you do find this software useful, Zoraxy will always be free (at least when I am still the primary author) and welcome any new ideas for making this software even better for everyone.

Final Words

Zoraxy is developed as a side project by a few university students and fresh graduates during their free time. While I am trying to keep the code as clean as possible and the architecture as self-contained as possible (i.e., trying not to depend on external services or Docker containers), there will always be bugs and non-stable releases that might break things. Please don't say harsh words to our contributors if there is something wrong with the software. We appreciate your understanding and support as we continue to improve and develop Zoraxy!