How to Properly Document Your Homemade Proxy Setup > 자유게시판

When building a custom proxy from scratch, comprehensive notes are indispensable — not only for your own future reference but as well as for collaborators, contributors, or future developers. Start by outlining the purpose of your proxy. Describe your motivation, which issue it addresses, and hackmd.io what kind of traffic it handles. This background enables others to understand the rationale immediately.

Detail the component layout. Break down every element — be it a Python script, YAML config, Docker container, or external API — and how they communicate. Add visual aids whenever feasible, even basic sketches scanned and embedded as PNGs. Clearly mark entry points, exit points, and data paths. Avoid the illusion that code is documentation, because source evolves, but clear notes endure.

Catalog every external requirement and its exact release. Whether you rely on pip packages, npm modules, or apt binaries, write them down with exact versions. Provide step-by-step setup commands. Specify all runtime parameters and config files, and offer concrete values annotated with their purpose and impact.

Document the full lifecycle commands. Provide the exact terminal instructions, required permissions, and frequent errors such as binding failures or TLS mismatches. If logging is enabled, detail the log directory, and the significance of debug, info, warn, and error. Provide real-world log samples with interpretations of system status.

Security must be prioritized. Describe how users are verified, whether you’re using basic auth, tokens, or certificates. Explain your secret management strategy — are they in environment variables, encrypted files, or hardcoded?. When proxies forward to external endpoints, specify them and their data handling policies. Restrict high-risk interfaces to private subnets only.

Add a dedicated FAQ section. Document recurring issues and their remedies. Such as: when clients send invalid User-Agent strings, the server segfaults — check for null headers in the parser, then add input sanitization — this prevents weeks of wasted investigation.

Treat docs as critical code. Embed it in your pull request checklist — update it every time you change the code, add a new feature, or fix a bug. Consider linking your documentation to a version control system so updates are versioned with commits. Even if you’re the only person using the proxy now, the next version of you will owe you a coffee.