Most sites use a thin slice of nginx: TLS, a folder of static files, a couple of routes to an app, health checks and the odd reload. The config grows anyway, one regex at a time, until nobody is quite sure which block handles a given URL.

BareProxy keeps its core to that slice and makes it answer questions. bareproxy explain takes a URL and shows which rule matched, which file or backend would serve it, and why the rules above it didn’t match. bareproxy why tells the story of a request that already happened, starting from the ID it carried in a response header.

I still run about twenty WordPress installs and I have no plans to burn them down. WordPress is competent software. It solved publishing for people who never wanted to open a terminal, it outlasted two decades of fashion, and a big share of the web runs on it for reasons that are not nostalgia. I’ve patched enough of my own installs to know the thing works.

So take this as coming from someone with money on both sides of the table.