> "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