In a recent pull request, the Next.js team announced that the middleware convention is being deprecated and replaced with proxy. Instead of middleware.ts, the team recommends using proxy.ts.
If your project lives under src/, then src/middleware.ts becomes src/proxy.ts. The logic for redirects, rewrites, or auth checks will continue to work the same way, so why the rename?
Developers often used middleware.ts for authentication, redirects, and rewrites, but the term middleware implied an open-ended pipeline of chained functions, which isn’t how Next.js edge logic works.
The term proxy, helps clarify that this feature is about intercepting and reshaping requests/responses at the edge, not building a middleware chain.
Read the official PR on Next.js GitHub.
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