assistant: Yes, there are some alternatives to Nginx that are written in Rust. Two popular options are:

1. Traefik: Traefik is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that can automatically discover backends and route traffic to them. It has built-in support for Docker and Kubernetes, and can be used to dynamically route traffic based on container labels, service discovery, or other criteria. Traefik is written in Go, but it also has a Rust-based plugin system called Yaegi, which allows you to write plugins in Rust.

2. Caddy: Caddy is a fast, easy-to-use HTTP/2 web server and reverse proxy written in Go. It has a modern, lightweight design and supports automatic HTTPS, automatic Let's Encrypt certificate provisioning, and other features out of the box. Caddy also has a plugin system that allows you to extend its functionality. One of its plugins, called Proxy Protocol, allows you to easily set up a reverse proxy with TCP/IP headers.

While Nginx is the most popular option for reverse proxying and load balancing, both Traefik and Caddy are solid alternatives that can be used in a Rust-based infrastructure.

assistant: Yes, there are some alternatives to Nginx written in Rust. Here are a few examples:

1. Trillium: Trillium is a lightweight web framework and HTTP server written in Rust that focuses on simplicity, ease-of-use, and performance. It's designed to be flexible and modular, and it supports middleware for handling common tasks like routing, serving static files, and logging.

2. Actix-web: Actix-web is a high-performance web framework for Rust that's designed for building large-scale, data-driven web applications. It uses a powerful actor model to handle requests and responses, and it supports both synchronous and asynchronous programming models.

3. Rocket: Rocket is a web framework for Rust that emphasizes simplicity, ease-of-use, and security. It provides a simple and intuitive API for building web applications, and it includes built-in support for templating, database access, and authentication.

All of these alternatives are actively maintained and have growing communities.

assistant: One way to achieve dynamic configuration between your frontend and backend in a dockerized environment is by using a reverse proxy server, such as Nginx or Traefik. The reverse proxy can be set up to route requests from your frontend to your backend based on the URL path.

In your case, you can set up a reverse proxy server and configure it to listen to requests coming from the frontend container. The proxy server can then forward the requests to the backend container based on the URL path. This way, the frontend application can send requests to a fixed URL (i.e., the proxy server URL) and the proxy server can route the requests to the appropriate backend container.

To achieve this, you can add an environment variable in your frontend application, which specifies the URL of the reverse proxy server. During development, you can set this variable to the local URL of the proxy server, and in production, you can set it to the URL of the remote proxy server.

Here's an example of how you can set up a reverse proxy using Nginx:

1. Add the following configuration to your docker-compose file:

version: '3'
services:
  proxy:
    image: nginx:latest
    ports:
      - "80:80"
    volumes:
      - ./nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf:ro
  frontend:
    build: .
    environment:
      - PROXY_URL=http://proxy:80
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
  backend:
    build: .
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"

2. Create an `nginx.conf` file in the same directory as your docker-compose file and add the following configuration:

events {
}

http {
  upstream backend {
    server backend:8080;
  }

  server {
    listen 80;
    server_name localhost;

    location /api {
      proxy_pass http://backend;
    }

    location / {
      proxy_pass http://frontend:3000;
    }
  }
}

3. Start the containers by running `docker-compose up -d`.

In this example, the `nginx.conf` file defines an upstream block that points to the backend container and a server block that listens to requests coming from the frontend container. The `location` blocks are used to route requests to the appropriate backend or frontend container based on the URL path.

Now, you can access your frontend application by going to `http://localhost:3000` and your backend API by going to `http://localhost/api`. The frontend application can be configured to use the proxy server URL by using the `PROXY_URL` environment variable.

With this setup, you can dynamically change the backend URL by changing the proxy server configuration without rebuilding the frontend application.

prompter: Thanks, that was super useful!