I've spent the last decade on Nginx and then of course spending lots of money on Nginx Plus for their upstream health checking. I knew HAProxy was a possible solution but was too happy with Nginx. The slow evolution of open-source Nginx has been frustrating to watch and the lack of basic features like upstream health checking in the open-source project is now ridiculous considering the excellent competition.

Is there a good alternative to openresty (aka nginx w/ lua) ?

I too have fought nginx on upstream health checking and have avoided the cost of Nginx Plus. I'd love a good alternative, but we have a number of lua plugins we depend on for rate limiting, metrics, auth, etc.

Well, HAProxy Community can do all this :)

I'm using caddy because it takes care of Lets Encrypt TLS certs. I'd use HAProxy but I don't know if it can do this without additional scripts.

Stay tune (tips: dataplaneapi)

ACME support must be integrated, this was turned into a mandatory feature nowadays…

I also use caddy, for my personal sites and I also have a work site that is a bunch of TLS redirectors for domains that the company owns to redirect to other domains. It works spectacularly in those use cases. At the time I set it up it wasn't possible to do that with an S3 endpoint, but now it is.

I do have an haproxy setup that does the right thing with LetsEncrypt, but it's just a path-based forwarder that works with an acme script on the system, not directly built in.

Hopefully it comes soon: https://github.com/haproxy/haproxy/issues/1864