Reverse Proxies

Martin can run without a reverse proxy.

Doing so has a few downsides:

• Martin does not support HTTPS connections (TLS termination).
• We do not check HOST-headers - we just serve on a port. This means anybody can point their dns record to your server and serve to all requests going to the port Martin is running on. Using a reverse proxy makes this abuse obvious.
• Martin only supports a simple in-memory caching. If you need more advanced caching options, you can use a reverse proxy like Nginx, Varnish, or Apache with custom rules. For example, you may choose to only cache zoom 0..10.
• You may need to host more than just tiles at a single domain name.
• Martin has a fixed public API, but your site may require a different structure, e.g. serving tiles with from a sub-path like /tiles/source/z/x/y.