While Odoo itself can serve web pages, it is strongly recommended to have a reverse proxy in front of it. A reverse proxy acts as an intermediary managing the traffic between the clients sending requests and the Odoo servers responding to them. Using a reverse proxy has several benefits.
On the security side, it can do the following:
- Handle (and enforce) HTTPS protocols to encrypt traffic
- Hide the internal network characteristics
- Act as an application firewall, limiting the URLs accepted for processing
Also, on the performance side, it can provide significant improvements:
- Cache static content, thus reducing the load on the Odoo servers
- Compress content to speed up loading time
- Act as a load balancer, distributing load between several servers
Apache is a popular option to use as a reverse proxy. Nginx is a recent alternative with good technical arguments...
