Module Overview

What You’ll Learn

• Explain what a reverse proxy does, and why production traffic rarely reaches Node.js directly
• Build a working reverse proxy in Node.js, and use it to route and load balance requests
• Explain how HTTPS termination works, and how a certificate keeps a connection encrypted

💡 Why this matters: Every request in this course so far has gone straight to Express, on localhost, over plain HTTP. Production traffic almost never does, a reverse proxy sits in front, handling HTTPS, routing, and distributing load, before a request ever reaches application code.

What’s Covered

• What a reverse proxy does, terminating connections, routing by path or host, and shielding the application behind it.
• Building one in Node.js, a real, working reverse proxy, for understanding the mechanism directly.
• Nginx, the standard, production-grade reverse proxy most Node.js deployments actually run behind.
• HTTPS and certificates, how TLS termination works, and how a service like Let’s Encrypt provides a certificate.

Hands-On

By the end of this module, you’ll have built a working reverse proxy in Node.js, and understand exactly what Nginx does differently in a real production deployment.

Next module: caching, reducing load on a database for data that doesn’t need to be fetched fresh on every request.