As Strapi does not handle SSL directly and hosting a Node.js service on the "edge" network is not a secure solution it is recommended that you use some sort of proxy application such as Nginx, Apache, HAProxy, Traefik, or others. Below you will find some sample configurations for HAProxy, naturally these configs may not suit all environments and you will likely need to adjust them to fit your needs.
The below examples are more or less acting as an "SSL termination" proxy, meaning that HAProxy is only accepting the requests on SSL and proxying to other backend services such as Strapi or other web servers. **HAProxy cannot serve static content** and as such it is usually used to handle multi-server deployments in a failover or load-balance situtation. The examples provided below are based around everything existing on the same server, but could easily be tweaked for multi-server deployments.
As mentioned previously the following examples are either proxying all requests directly to Strapi or are splitting requests between Strapi and some other backend web server such as Nginx, Apache, or others.
This config is using the sub-domain that is dedicated to Strapi only. It will redirect normal HTTP traffic over to SSL and proxies all requests (both api and admin) to the Strapi server running on the server.
This config is using a sub-folder that is dedicated to Strapi only. It will redirect normal HTTP traffic over to SSL and proxies the "frontend" to `localhost:8080`, but proxies all strapi requests on the `example.com/api` sub-path to the locally running Strapi application.
This config is using a sub-folder that is dedicated to Strapi only. It will redirect normal HTTP traffic over to SSL and proxies the "frontend" to `localhost:8080`, but proxies all strapi api requests on the `example.com/api` sub-path to the locally running Strapi application. Likewise it will proxy all admin requests on the `example.com/dashboard` sub-path.
Please note that this config is not focused on the frontend hosting, you will most likely need to adjust this to your frontend software requirements, it is only being shown here as an example.
In order to take full advantage of a proxied Strapi application you will need to configure Strapi to make it aware of the upstream proxy. Like with the above HAProxy configurations there are 3 matching examples. To read more about this server configuration file please see the [server configuration concept](../concepts/configurations.md#server) documentation.
