I almost always use a reverse proxy for some or all of the following:

- Serving static files

- Not needing to care about binding your application to a privileged port (below 1024)

- SSL certificate handling

- Hosting several applications on the same IP

For a minimal development setup you might not need it though, depends on what you want to do I guess.

> "I almost always use a reverse proxy for some or all of the following:

- Serving static files

- Not needing to care about binding your application to a privileged port (below 1024)

- SSL certificate handling

- Hosting several applications on the same IP"

All of this should be handled at a higher level with load balancers doing your SSL termination, and CDN for static files. There's no reason your application server should care about any of that stuff.

I mostly work on small scale stuff. There is nothing to load balance if you only have one machine :D

And for development you probably don't want to use a CDN.

Edit: it just occurred to me that a load balancer is nothing but a reverse proxy anyway. Running on a different machine usually, but not really different from nginx on the local machine from the point of view of the application software.

Which is why s/he is using Nginx to simulate that in the dev environment if I’m not misunderstanding?

Yes nginx is great to bundle in early

I came up on this issue, I think the main problem is as React-Router is being used its a SPA; all front end routes need to resolve to the same index.html. Totally do-able with Go but it was a bit of a pain to get it working, I ended up wrapping the "route not found" handler with some logic to serve index for given frontend routes. nginx gets you this very quickly so I ended up using this instead.

If it was my case, I still undecided which reverse proxy can replace Nginx, however, there are no known performance benchmarks for Caddy 2 I could refer to.

Nginx was designed to handle backend services easily and programmers from different background may not be well verse in Golang at the beginning.

It is generally repeated that the Go stdlib webserver is internet-facing-ok and production-ready (with appropriate timeouts being set on the http.Server), making a reverse proxy unnecessary.

There are also dead-simple TLS libraries, some that will even get LE certs automatically.

Agreed, I have recently built a web server entirely (with timeouts) in Go too and acme.sh for LE certs but I still haven't find a way to support Wordpress from Go to PHP-FPM, I'm not well verse to fix the only this part, if you have any suggestion is greatly appreciate.

Ssl certificate

Reverse Proxy for possible load balancing?