tldr: I’d like to set up a reverse proxy with a domain and an SSL cert so my partner and I can access a few selfhosted services on the internet but I’m not sure what the best/safest way to do it is. Asking my partner to use tailsclae or wireguard is asking too much unfortunately. I was curious to know what you all recommend.
I have some services running on my LAN that I currently access via tailscale. Some of these services would see some benefit from being accessible on the internet (ex. Immich sharing via a link, switching over from Plex to Jellyfin without requiring my family to learn how to use a VPN, homeassistant voice stuff, etc.) but I’m kind of unsure what the best approach is. Hosting services on the internet has risk and I’d like to reduce that risk as much as possible.
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I know a reverse proxy would be beneficial here so I can put all the services on one box and access them via subdomains but where should I host that proxy? On my LAN using a dynamic DNS service? In the cloud? If in the cloud, should I avoid a plan where you share cpu resources with other users and get a dedicated box?
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Should I purchase a memorable domain or a domain with a random string of characters so no one could reasonably guess it? Does it matter?
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What’s the best way to geo-restrict access? Fail2ban? Realistically, the only people that I might give access to live within a couple hundred miles of me.
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Any other tips or info you care to share would be greatly appreciated.
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Feel free to talk me out of it as well.
If security is one of your concerns, search for “HTTP client side certificates”. TL;DR: you can create certificates to authenticate the client and configure the server to allow connections only from trusted devices. It adds extra security because attackers cannot leverage known vulnerabilities on the services you host since they are blocked at http level.
It is a little difficult to find good and updated documentation but I managed to make it work with nginx. The downside is that Firefox mobile doesn’t support them, but Firefox PC and Chrome have no issues.
Of course you want also a server side certificate, the easiest way is to get it from Let’s Encrypt
nixos with nginx services does all proxying and ssl stuff, fail2ban is there as well
Either tailscale or cloudflare tunnels are the most adapted solution as other comments said.
For tailscale, as you already set it up, just make sure you have an exit node where your services are. I had to do a bit of tinkering to make sure that the ips were resolved : its just an argument to the tailscale command.
But if you dont want to use tailscale because its to complicated to your partner, then cloudlfare tunnels is the other way to go.
How it works is by creating a tunnel between your services and cloudlare, kind of how a vpn would work. You usually use the cloudlfared CLI or directly throught Cloudflare’s website to configure the tunnel. You should have a DNS imported to cloudflare by the way, because you have to do a binding such as : service.mydns.com -> myservice.local Cloudlfare can resolve your local service and expose it to a public url.
Just so you know, cloudlfare tunnels are free for some of that usage, however cloudlfare has the keys for your ssl traffic, so they in theory could have a look at your requests.
best of luck for the setup !
I used to do a reverse proxy setup with caddy , but now I self host a Wireguard VPN. It has access to Nextcloud on the same machine, Home Assistant and Kodi on another. On our phones, Wireguard only has access to certain apps the rest of the network traffic is normal, so a nice simple setup.
Cloudflare
I presume you’re referring to Cloudflare tunnel?
Yep, cloudflare tunnel / Zero trust.
Dead easy to set up.
Nginx Proxy Manager + LetsEncrypt.
The biggest reason to use VPN is that some ISPs may take issue with you running a web server over a residential service when they see incoming HTTP requests to your IP. If you don’t want to require VPN, then Cloudflare tunnels are perfect for this and they also solve the need for dynamic DNS if you want to use static domain because your domain points to the Cloudflare edge servers and they route it to you wherever your tunnel endpoint is running.
Past that, Traefik is a great reverse proxy that can manage getting LetsEnrcypt SSL certificates for you even with wildcard domains and would still work fine with dynamic DNS.
Do you mind giving a high level overview of what a Cloudlfare tunnel is doing? Like, what’s connected to what and how does the data flow? I’ve seen cloudflare mentioned a few other times in the comments here. I know Cloudflare offers DNS services via their 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 IPs and I also know they somehow offer DDoS protection (although I’m not sure how exactly. caching?). However, that’s the limit of my knowledge of Cloudflare
It doesn’t improve security much to host your reverse proxy outside your network, but it does hide your home IP if you care.
If your app can exploited over the web and through a proxy it doesn’t matter if that proxy is on the same machine or over the network.
5). Hey OP, don’t worry, this can seem kind of scary at first, but it is not that difficult. I’ve skimmed some of the other comments and there are plenty of good tips here.
2). Yes, you will want your own domain and there is no fear of other people “knowing it” if you have everything set up correctly.
1b). Any cheap VPS will do and you don’t need to worry about it being virtualized rather than dedicated. What you really care about is bandwidth speed and limits because a reverse proxy is typically very light on resources. You would be surprised how little CPU/memory it needs.
1a). I use a cheap VPS from RackNerd. Once you have access to your VPS, just install your proxy directly into the OS or in Docker. Whichever is easier. The most important thing for choosing a reverse proxy is automatic TLS/Let’s Encrypt. I saw a comment from you about certbot… don’t bother with all that nonsense. Either Traefik, Caddy, or Nginx Proxy Manager (not vanilla Nginx) will do all this for you–I personally use Traefik unless for some reason I can’t. Way less headaches. The second most important thing to decide is how your VPS in the cloud will connect back to your home securely… I personally use Tailscale for that and it works perfectly fine.
3). Honestly, I think Fail2Ban and geo restrictions are overdoing it. Fail2ban has never gotten me any lift because any sort of modern brute force attack will come from a botnet that has 1000s of unique IPs… never triggering Fail2ban because no repeat offenders. Just ensure your VPS has a firewall enabled and you know what ports you are exposing from Docker and you should be good. If your services don’t natively support authentication, look into something like Authelia or Authentik. Rather than Fail2Ban and/or geo restrictions, I would be more inclined to suggest a WAF like Caddy WAF before I reached for geo restrictions. Again, assuming your concern is security, a WAF would do way more for you than IP restrictions which are easily circumvented.
4). Have fun!
EDIT: formatting
I appreciate the info, thanks
Tailscale is completely transparent on any devices I’ve used it on. Install, set up, and never look at it again because unless it gets turned off, it’s always on.
I’ve run into a weird issue where on my phone, tailscale will disconnect and refuse to reconnect for a seemingly random amount of time but usually less than hour. It doesn’t happen often but it is often enough that I’ve started to notice. I’m not sure if it’s a network issue or app issue but during that time, I can’t connect to my services. All that to say, my tolerance for that is higher than my partner’s; the first time something didn’t work, they would stop using it lol
So I have it running on about 20 phones for customers of mine that use Blue Iris with it. But these are all Apple devices, I’m the only one with Android. I’ve never had a complaint except one person that couldn’t get on at all, and we found that for some reason the Blue Iris app was blacklisted in the network settings from using the VPN. But that’s the closest I’ve seen to your problem.
I wonder if you set up a ping every 15 seconds from the device to the server if that would keep the tunnel active and prevent the disconnect. I don’t think tailscale has a keepalive function like a wireguard connection. If that’s too much of a pain, you might want to just implement Wireguard yourself since you can set a KeepAlive value and the tunnel won’t go idle. Tailscale is probably wanting to reduce their overhead so they don’t include a keepalive.
relatable
Caddy with cloudflare support in a docker container.
This the solution.
Caddy is simple.
I currently have a nginx docker container and certbot docker container that I have working but don’t have in production. No extra features, just a barebones reverse proxy with an ssl cert. Knowing that, I read through Caddy’s homepage but since I’ve never put an internet facing service into production, it’s not obvious to me what features I need or what I’m missing out on. Do you mind sharing what the quality of life improvements you benefit from with Caddy are?
Honestly, if you know nginx just stick with it. There’s nothing to be gained by learning a new proxy.
Use Mozilla’s SSL generator if you want to harden nginx (or any proxy you choose)- https://ssl-config.mozilla.org/
I never went too far down the nginx route, so I can’t really compare the two. I ended up with caddy because I self-host vaultwarden and it really doesn’t like running over http (for obvious reasons) and caddy was the instruction set I found and understood first.
I don’t make a lot of what I host available to the wider internet, for the ones that I do, I recently migrated to using a Cloudflare tunnel to deal with the internet at large, but still have it come through caddy once it hits my server to get ssl. For everything else I have a headscale server in Oracle’s free tier that all my internal services connect to.
How do you handle SSL certs and internet access in your setup?
I have NPM running as “gateway” between my LAN and the Internet and let handle it all of my vertificates using the built-in Let’s Encrypt features. None of my hosted applications know anything about certificates in their Docker containers.
As for your questions:
- You can and should – it makes managing the applications much easier. You should use some containerization. Subdomains and correct routing will be done by the reverse proxy. You basically tell the proxy “when a request for foo.example.com comes in, forward it to myserver.local, port 12345” where 12345 is the port the container communicates over.
- 100% depends on your use case. I purchased a domain because I host stuff for external access, too. I just have my setup to report it’s external IP address to my domain provider. It basically is some dynamic DNS service but with a “real domain”. If you plan to just host for yourself and your friends, some generic subdomain from a dynamic DNS service would do the trick. (Using NPMs Let’s Encrypt configuration will work with that, too.)
- You can’t. Every georestricting can be circumvented. If you want to restrict access, use HTTP basic auth. You can set that up using NPM, too. So users authenticate against NPM and only when it was successful,m the routing to the actual content will be done.
- You might want to look into Cloudflare Tunnel to hide your real IP address and protect against DDoS attacks.
- No 🙂
“NPM” node package manager?
- Yeah I’ve been playing around with docker and a domain to see how all that worked. Got the subdomains to work and everything, just don’t have them pointing to services yet.
- I’m definitely interested in the authentication part here. Do you have an tutorials you could share?
- Will do, thanks
- ❤️
I don’t know how markdown works. that should be 1,3,4,5
nginx proxy manager
I was reading this and thinking node package manager too and I was both confused and concerned that somebody would sit all of their security on node package manager!
That makes much more sense 🙂
there’s so many acronyms. Thanks
On my home network I have nginxproxymanager running let’s encrypt with my domain for https, currently only for vaultwarden (I’m testing it for a bit for rolling it out or migrating wholly over to https). My domain is a ######.xyz that’s cheap.
For remote access I use Tailscale. For friends and family I give them a relay [raspberry pi with nginx which proxys them over tailscale] that sits on their home network, that way they need “something they have”[the relay] and “something they know” [login credentials] to get at my stuff. I won’t implement biometrics for “something they are”. This is post hoc justification though, and nonesense to boot. I don’t want to expose a port and a VPS has low WAF and I’m not installing tailscale on all of their devices so s relay is an unhappy compromise.
For bonus points I run pihole to pretty up the domain names to service.swirl and run a homarr instance so no-one needs to remember anything except home.swirl, but if they do remember immich.swirl that works too.
If there are many ways to skin a cat I believe I chose to use a spoon, don’t be like me. Updating each dockge instance is a couple minutes and updating diet pi is a few minutes more which, individually, is not a lot on my weekly/monthly maintence respectfully. But on aggregate… I have checklists. One day I’ll write a script that will ssh into a machine > update/upgrade the os > docker compose pull/rebuild/purge> move on to the next relay… That’ll be my impetus to learn how to write a script.
That’ll be my impetus to learn how to write a script.
This part caught my eye. You were able to do all that other stuff without ever attempting to write a script? That’s surprising and awesome. Assuming you are running everything on a linux server, I feel like a bash script that is run via a cronjob would be your best bet, no need to ssh into the server, just let it do it on it’s own. I haven’t tested any of this but I do have scripts I wrote that do automatic ZFS backups and scrubs; the order should go something like:
open the terminal on the server and type
mkdir scriptscd scriptsnano docker-updates.shtype something along the lines of this (I’m still learning docker so adjust the commands to your needs)
#!/bin/bash cd /path/to/scripts/docker-compose.yml docker compose pull && docker compose up -d docker image prune -fsave the file and then type
sudo chmod +x ./docker-updates.shto make it executableand finally set up a cronjob to run the script at specific intervals. type
crontab -eor
sudo crontab -e(this is if you want to run the script as root but ideally, you just add your user to the docker group so this shouldn’t be needed)and at the bottom of the file type this and save, that’s it:
# runs script at 1am on the first of every month 0 1 1 * * /path/to/scripts/docker-updates.shthis website will help you choose a different interval
For OS updates you basically do the same thing except the script would look something like: (I forget if you need to type “sudo” or not; it’s running as root so I don’t think you need it but maybe try it with sudo in front of both "apt"s if it’s not working. Also use whatever package manager you have if you aren’t using apt)
while in the scripts folder you created earlier
nano os-updates.sh#!/bin/bash apt update -y && apt upgrade -y reboot nowsave and don’t forget to make it exectuable
then use
sudo crontab -e(because you’ll need root privileges to update. this will run the script as root without requiring you to input your password)# runs script at 12am on the first of every month 0 0 1 * * /path/to/scripts/os-updates.shI did think about cron but, long ago, I heard it wasn’t best practice to update through cron because the lack of logs makes things difficult to see where things went wrong, when they do.
I’ve got automatic-upgrades running on stuff so it’s mostly fine. Dockge is running purely to give me a way to upgrade docker images without having to ssh. It’s just the monthly routine of “apt update && apt upgrade -y” *5 that sucks.
Thank you for the advice though. I’ll probably set cron to update the images with the script as you suggest. I have a “maintenance” homarr page as a budget uptime kuma so I can quickly look there to make sure everything is pinging at least. I made the page so I can quickly get to everyone’s dockge, pihole and nginx but the pings were a happy accident.
or a domain with a random string of characters so no one could reasonably guess it? Does it matter?
That does not work. As soon as you get SSL certificates, expect the domain name to be public knowledge, especially with Let’s Encrypt and all other certificate authorities with transparency logs. As a general rule, don’t rely on something to be hidden from others as a security measure.
It is possible to get wildcard certificates from LetsEnrcypt which doesn’t give anyone information on which subdomains are valid as your reverse proxy would handle that. Still arguably security through obscurity, but it does make it substantially harder for anyone who can’t intercept traffic between the client and server.
Damn, I didn’t realize they had public logs like that. Thanks for the heads up
Https://crt.sh would make anyone who thought obscurity would be a solution poop themselves.
I use a central nginx container to redirect to all my other services using a wildcard let’s encrypt cert for my internal domain from acme.sh and I access it all externally using a tailscale exit node. The only publicly accessible service that I run is my Lemmy instance. That uses a cloudflare tunnel and is isolated in it’s own vlan.
TBH I’m still not really happy having any externally accessible service at all. I know enough about security to know that I don’t know enough to secure against much anything. I’ve been thinking about moving the Lemmy instance to a vps so it can be someone else’s problem if something bad leaks out.
Don’t fret, not even Microsoft does.
You’re not as valuable as a target as Microsoft.
It’s just about risk tokerance. The only way to avoid risk is to not play the game.
wildcard let’s encrypt cert
I know what “wildcard” and “let’s encrypt cert” are separately but not together. What’s going on with that?
How do you have your tailscale stuff working with ssl? And why did you set up ssl if you were accessing via tailscale anyway? I’m not grilling you here, just interested.
I know enough about security to know that I don’t know enough to secure against much anything
I feel that. I keep meaning to set up something like nagios for monitoring and just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
So when I ask Let’s Encrypt for a cert, I ask for *.int.teuto.icu instead of specifically jellyfin.int.teuto.icu, that way I can use the same cert for any internally running service. Mostly I use SSL on everything to make browsers complain less. There isn’t much security benefit on a local network. I suppose it makes harder to spoof on an external network, but I don’t think that’s a serious threat for a home net. I used to use home.lan for all of my services, but that has the drawback of redirecting to a search by default on most browsers. I have my tailscale exit node running on my router and it just works with SSL like anything else.
Ok so I currently have a cert set up to work with:
domain.com www.domain.com (some browsers seemingly didn’t like it if I didn’t have www) subdomain.domain.com
Are you saying I could just configure it like this: domain.com *.domain.com
The idea of not having to keep updating the cert with new subdomains (and potentially break something in the process) is really appealing
Yes. If you’re using lets encrypt then note that they do not support wildcard certs with the HTTP-01 challenge type. You will need to use the DNS-01 challenge type. To utilize it you would need a domain registrar that supports api dns updates like cloudflare and then you can use the acme.sh package. Here is an example guide i found.
Note that you could still request multiple explicit subdomains in the same issue/renew commands so it’s not a huge deal either way but the wildcard will be more seamless in the future if you don’t know what other services you might want to selfhost.
