# Reverse Proxies

Martin **can run without** a reverse proxy.

Doing so has a few downsides:

- Martin does not support HTTPS connections (TLS termination).
- Martin does not authenticate requests. If some sources are private, the reverse proxy has to check the request before Martin sees it, for example with [`auth_request` in NGINX](<https://maplibre.org/martin/run-with-nginx/#authenticating-requests>).
- 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 with custom rules. You may for example only want to cache zoom `0..10`. Here are some reverse proxy options:

  - [Nginx](<https://nginx.org/>)
  - [Varnish](<https://varnish-cache.org/>)
  - [Apache](<https://httpd.apache.org/>)

For client- and CDN-side caching, Martin can set the `Cache-Control` response header itself via the `cache_control` option in the [configuration file](<https://maplibre.org/martin/config-file/index.md>), both as a server-wide default and per tile source. - You may need to host more than just tiles/resources on the domain name. - Martin has a fixed public API, but your site may require a different structure. For example, you may want to serve tiles from `/{sourceID}/tiles?z={z}&x={x}&y={y}` instead of `/{sourceID}/{z}/{x}/{y}`.