Benefits of running PeerTube instance behind reverse proxy?

PeerTube
1

I’m currently hosting my PeerTube instance on a public VPS and when I went to go enable YouTube importing I saw this warning:

« If enabled, we recommend to use a HTTP proxy to prevent private URL access from your PeerTube server »

Now I don’t think there’s any security risks since my instance is already public, but I was wondering if there’s any benefits to running a reverse proxy anyways? Typically this is done for things like load balancing or performance (i.e. caching the common stuff on the reverse proxy and letting the backend server focus on the dynamic content/heavy lifting), but I’m not familiar enough with PeerTube to know if the app would benefit from this or not.

Would a reverse proxy have any noticeable impact on performance (page loads, video viewing, imports/uploads, etc…) be it positive or negative? Would a reverse proxy allow me to run multiple backend servers to handle transcoding if I’m using a single object storage bucket? Anything else I’m not thinking of that can hurt/improve performance?

Thanks!

2

Hi,

« If enabled, we recommend to use a HTTP proxy to prevent private URL access from your PeerTube server »

An HTTP proxy is not a reverse proxy :slight_smile: An HTTP proxy is used for out HTTP requests, so HTTP requests made by PeerTube.

Would a reverse proxy have any noticeable impact on performance (page loads, video viewing, imports/uploads, etc…) be it positive or negative?

You don’t already use nginx in your peertube setup? nginx would have a positive impact.

Would a reverse proxy allow me to run multiple backend servers to handle transcoding if I’m using a single object storage bucket?

No sorry it’s not supported by peertube. See Support for transcoding by remote workers · Issue #947 · Chocobozzz/PeerTube · GitHub for more information.

3

Thank you for the clarification, so what is the advantage to having an HTTP Proxy?

I forgot there’s an nginx reverse proxy on the PeerTube server so probably no benefit to moving it to a remote server.

4

As said in the web interface, it « prevents private URL access from your PeerTube server »