While Odoo itself can serve web pages, it's strongly recommended that there is a reverse proxy positioned in front of it. A reverse proxy acts as an intermediary that manages the traffic between clients sending requests and the Odoo servers responding to them. Using a reverse proxy has several benefits.
On the security side, it can do the following:
- Handle (and enforce) HTTPS protocols to encrypt traffic
- Hide the internal network characteristics
- Act as an application firewall, limiting the URLs accepted for processing
Also, on the performance side, it can provide the following significant improvements:
- Cached static content, hence reducing the load on the Odoo servers
- Compressed content to speed up loading time
- Act as a load balancer, distributing load between several servers
Apache is a popular choice when considering a reverse proxy, although nginx is a recent alternative with good technical arguments. Here, we'll choose to use nginx as a reverse proxy and show...