Hi everybody.
How should I setup reverse proxy for my services? I’ve got things like jellyfin, immich a bitwarden running on my Debian server in docker. So should i install something like nginx for each of these also in docker? Or should I install it from repository and make configs for each of these docker services?
Btw I have no idea how to use something like nginx or caddy but i would still like to learn.
Also can you use nginx for multiple services on the same port like(443)?
Caddy
It’s three lines of configuration
jellyfin.example.com { reverse_proxy http://localhost:8083/ }Automatic https with let’sencrypt, simplicity of a single binary, downgrade is as simple as replace binary & restart service.
Fucking hell why do I use Apache 😂
Because you love the pain that comes with pulling your own hair out, one fistful at a time.
Wow
I use Nginx Proxy Manager running as a docker container. Its a gui that makes administration more straight forward. It points at all my services (docker and otherwise) and handles the SSL for me. Because I don’t want to have any ports open I use DNS challenge ACME and NPM has built in support for a number APIs from large public DNS providers to automate that.
This plus technitium DNS is exactly my approach.
i have nginx proxy manager set up all as well, but haven’t worked out the SSL part yet, so all my internal docker services are still on http
out of interest, how did you set up https with npm?
First set up your certificate in the SSL tab of NPM. You can either upload a traditional certificate or set up LetsEncrypt. Be aware that starting next spring the maximum length of a certificate will drop to 9 months and continue to decrease over the next few years until its 47 days.
I have mine set up so LetsEncrypt gets a wildcard cert for my domain (via DNS challenge). Some people go with per subdomain certs.
Once you have the cert, go you each of your hosts and switch to its SSL tab. Then select your cert. Then I usually turn on “Force SSL”
does a wild card cert essentially mean i have use one cert which will cover all my subdomains as well as the primary domain?
yes
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Yeah, another vote for Caddy. I’ve run nginx as a reverse proxy before and it wasn’t too bad, but Caddy is even easier. Needs naff-all resources too. My ProxMox VM for it has 256 MB of RAM!
I’ll definitely take a look at so thx. Also I’m using duckdns right now so i didn’t need to port forward anything but if I use my domain do i need to port forward ports 80&443 from through my router to my debian server (192.168.200.101)?
To access things outside of your LAN (for example from your phone while at the grocery store), each service gets a DuckDNS entry. “service.myduckdns.com” or whatever.
Your phone will look for service.myduckdns.com on port 443, because you’ll have https:// certificates and that all happens on port 443.
When that request eventually gets to your router and is trying to penetrate your firewall, you’ll need 443 open and forwarded to your Debian machine.
So yes, you have it right.
Also forward port 80.
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You can also choose a mesh vpn like tailscale and then you don’t have to worry about ddns or port forwarding at all, ace you can still use a reverse proxy.
I mean i have a wireguard on my router but how can I point the domain from my provider like (godaddy) to my server without opening ports?
I prefer doing nginx on the host (vs a container), & have different configs for each service. You can have multiple services on the same port, it can be controlled via DNS instead (i.e.: access Jellyfin.domain.com & bitwarden.domain.com, both of 443).
Ive tried Caddy once or twice but couldn’t get it working, so i just stick with nginx & cert or to automatically get certificates from my internal CA
Yeah but when I last tried nginx on my bitwarden host and another on my jellyfin host i could access the one for bitwarden on port 81 of my server but couldn’t access the other nginx web page on port 85 even though i have written it in docker compose file and the port 85 was also open on my server.
It looks like jhdeval mentioned this already, but you may need to review your config file. By default, you would likely have nginx listening on ports 80 & 443 for requests to a specific address (i.e.: jellyfin.domain.com) which would be configured in your DNS, & then nginx would direct the jellfin 443 traffic to port 85 to access Jellyfin. Same principle for Bitwarden. If you have your nginx config files, i \ we could take a look & see if we spot any issues.
I’m currently cannot post it here and also since it didn’t work the first time I’m using only http for jellyfin and immich but i can later post the docker config for bitwarden.
I’m doing the same with Apache in a container. Using Let’s Encrypt with DNS challenge for SSL certificate. The DNS records point to the reverse proxy IP which is only accessible via VPN (Tailscale). 😂
nginx + certbot \ acme for certs from my local Step-CA, proper DNS & I just use a WireGuard VPN on-demand for when I leave my house. As soon as I’m off my Wi-Fi I have the VPN active so I don’t need to expose anything more than 1 port for that to work =]
I might look at Tailscale, if only because I’ve seen plenty of people say that’s how they connect, so worth looking into =]
If you want to stay fully self-hosted, look into Headscale. You could run it locally with a port open, or you could throw it on the tiniest cloud VM somewhere and have zero ports open at home.
Thanks! I’ll take a look at that.
There’s Nginx proxy manager if you want to set it up. But I’d rather go with Tailscale instead.
tailscale is not the same as nginx or any reverse proxy, though. I don’t expose anything publicly, but I still wouldn’t stop using a reverse proxy
Ok, fair enough.
IMO, look into the linuxserver.io fork of NGINX, called SWAG.
It comes preloaded with a bunch of fantastic addons for security.
Quite easy to get set up, if you’ve got an idea about how it works.
Since your a beginner, youll find nginx proxy manager easiest, it has a nice ui, and at this stage you are probably less intrested in the 10/10 fastest lighweight setup and more intrested in getting stuff working.
Nginx Proxy Manager was easy to learn as a beginner. I’d recommend it as a learning tool, if nothing else, and if you want to switch to other solutions later you can.
Did traefik become uncool? I only read about caddy/nginx/ha here.
my last experience with it was a half empty documentation, and a config structure that signaled to me that they dropped a lot of features for v2 release that they initially wanted to have, which has additionally made understanding their config structure harder. and that hasn’t improved for years.
I think it’s still one of the best solutions.
I recommend Caddy. It’s very easy to deploy, and configuring it is a snap. This tutorial helped me out a bunch. There is a Docker version of Caddy, tho I have never used it. I figured, Caddy would do better installed on bare metal. I use Caddy in conjunction with Duckdns.org. Caddy also takes care of renewing your certs when it’s time.
Reverse proxying was tricky for me, I started with Nginx Proxy Manager and it started out fine, was able to reverse proxy my services in the staging phase however, once I tried to get production SSL/TLS certificates it kept running into errors (this was a while ago I can’t remember exactly) so that pushed me to SWAG and swag worked great! Reverse proxying was straight forward, SSL/TLS certificates worked well however, overall it felt slow, so now I’m using Traefik and so far have no complaints.
It’s honestly whatever works for you and what you prefer having.
This may be a controversial approach, but I recently had to set up reverse proxy along with DNS configuration and certificate handling. I pair programmed with an LLM.
My experience was this… I described what I wanted to set up, my objectives (like containerisation, zero touch deployment, idempotence, etc) and it gave me a starting point. It threw a few bad ideas in but I also asked it to help me stress test against the objectives. I think it’s all just about working now. I learned a lot about shell, docker, nginx, terraform, VM metadata, data persistence, pulling it all in from a git repo, bootstrapping nginx with self-signed certificates, auto renewal, vscode devcontainers and more. Honestly I’m worried about what a pro would make of my code, but I made huge steps in a relatively short time. Disclaimer: I am a software engineer who was keen to learn this stuff and get moving quickly.
I would definitely consider this approach if you’re new to the area.
I know this is beyond the scope of your question but you are at a very similar place like i was over a year ago.
For the reverse proxy you want ingnx manager and it will handle all of your reverse proxies just fine.
But what i really want to recommend is to change up that debian into proxmox,
Proxmox is a debian based efficient server OS. Basically every service you run now can Easily be run as its own isolated container with very little overhang.
Best of all there is a community for Helper script that will install entire services including Nginx but even nextcloud from a single command.
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=nginxproxymanager
Thx I appreciate the input. I have already a lot of things set up on the server and switching now would be painful and time consuming. I also use docker in conjunction with kvm-qemu and had I known about proxmox a month ago I would not have construct it at such but alas. I will however in the future get another hardware which I will use as a home server and I will definitely give proxmox a shot.
Unrealted but Alpine Linux is based af!
A lot of people aren’t big fans of Nginx Proxy Manager, which is separate from Nginx. But I like it. It’s got a nice gui, and the part I really like is the letsencrypt ssl certs baked in. You can get a new one, for a new service with a click of a button, and it auto renews your certs, so you don’t have to worry about it once it’s set up.
What is your goal, simplest to configure? industry standard? Secure options set by default? Do you need a gui or are you fine with config files?
Something secure and easy to understand and setup for beginner. The easier the better. I don’t mind writing config files if I can understand it.
Nginx Proxy Manager is probably your best bet at this stage. It’s a simple to use GUI with QOL features like automatic certificate acquisition built on top of the industry standard Nginx. It should do everything you need it to do and it’s hands down the easiest to get started with.
When you reach the point that you’re trying to do something outside the scope of Nginx Proxy Manager’s gui, that would be a good time to get into another solution that’s config file based. My weapon of choice here is Caddy. I LOVE how simple and minimal the configuration is and it does a lot of things by default that other solutions don’t.
Plain Nginx is a solid tool but working with it directly will be the least straightforward and beginner friendly of all the solutions. Only reason I’d recommend straight Nginx is if you want experience with it for work.
Traefik, don’t bother with until you have an actual reason to use it over other solutions (Like you’re getting into clustering or kubernetes or anything else that requires dynamic configuration instead of static.)
