Reverse Web Proxies and other things

[ratsalad]

I started out testing port forwarding so I could setup a webserver and a few virtual hosts on my local computer and was able to get everything working just fine. Now I decided to change from just port forwarding to using varnish as a reverse proxy which seems to be working, but I am not sure how it actually working.
I am now only using the forwarding rule for ssl port 443.

On the VPS

Varnish is setup with
.host = "192.168.1.100";
.port = "8088";

And to listen to the Server IP on port 80.
ExecStart=/usr/sbin/varnishd -a ServerIP:80 -f /etc/varnish/default.vcl -s malloc,256m

On the local server

And NGINX on the local system is setup to listen with:
server {
listen 8088 default_server;
listen [::]:8088 default_server;

So the reason for the SSL port forwarding seems to work is Cerbot only accepts SSL connections on the webserver.

The only problem with this arrangement is that even though everything seems to be working, there is no indication that varnish is actually doing anything on the VPS as there is no logging of traffic.

Just curious if there would be anything that should be changed that anyone knows of? I am not even able to track traffic because I quite possibly could using the wrong interface or IP address and not even know it.