# Behind a Proxy

In some situations, you might need to use a **proxy** server like Traefik or Nginx with a configuration that adds an extra path prefix that is not seen by your application.

In these cases you can use `root_path` to configure your application.

The `root_path` is a mechanism provided by the ASGI specification (that FastAPI is built on, through Starlette).

The `root_path` is used to handle these specific cases.

I'll tell you a bit more about these **concepts** here, and that would hopefully give you the **intuition** you would need to decide how to deploy your API in very different environments, possibly even in **future** ones that don't exist yet.

By considering these concepts, you will be able to **evaluate and design** the best way to deploy **your own APIs**.

# Settings and Environment Variables

In many cases your application could need some external settings or configurations, for example secret keys, database credentials, credentials for email services, etc.

Most of these settings are variable (can change), like database URLs. And many could be sensitive, like secrets.

For this reason it's common to provide them in environment variables that are read by the application.

## Environment Variables

!!! tip

When using Poetry, it would make sense to use **Docker multi-stage builds** because you don't really need to have Poetry and its dependencies installed in the final container image, you **only need** to have the generated `requirements.txt` file to install your project dependencies.