However, these packages don’t let us harness all features of HAProxy. These packages help you with basic configuration of HAProxy using GUI. Just install any one of these packages and you can see “HAProxy” under “Services” menu in pfSense. Haproxy-full (1.4.21 pkg v 1.0) – This package implements both TCP and HTTP balance features from HAProxy. Haproxy (1.4.21 pkg v 1.2) – This package implements HTTP balance features from HAProxy.

There are two packages available for HAProxy. There are so many useful packages in that list like pfflowd, squid3, iperf etc. Package manager is one of the best things in pfSense. They show up in pfSense menu and packages even support their own GUI. Users wishing to extend the functionality of their pfSense installation can use pfSense packages. There are couples of ways to integrate them. Integrating both of these solutions in one package on our network edge is very desirable. HAProxy is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications. Off-load SSL processing from actual servers.

Collect health and performance stats of your web infrastructure.

Secure your servers from malicious clients or requests with malicious content.

Redirect some links straight away before even sending it to servers.

Throttle client requests based on clients properties.

Load balance requests to various servers based on weight or there availability.

Hence it is very desirable to have features on our network edge where we can perform various tasks on these incoming requests before forwarding them to actual servers. Incoming request from external clients has to pass through pfSense. pfSense is a firewall sitting at the edge of your network. HAProxy and pfSense are both wonderful solutions on their own.

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