Glossary · Protocols & authentication
Reverse proxy
A proxy that sits in front of servers rather than clients, handling incoming requests on their behalf, the opposite direction from the forward proxies used for scraping.
A reverse proxy is the mirror image of the proxies this glossary mostly describes. A forward proxy sits in front of you and hides your identity from the servers you reach; a reverse proxy sits in front of the servers and fields requests on their behalf, so visitors talk to it instead of the machines behind it.
Its jobs are server-side: spreading load across a pool of backends, terminating TLS, caching responses, and shielding origin servers from direct exposure. If you have used a CDN or an nginx front end, you have used a reverse proxy.
It earns a glossary entry mainly to draw the line. When someone says proxy in the context of scraping or privacy they mean the forward kind, the reverse proxy is infrastructure a site runs for itself, not a tool you route your own traffic through.
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