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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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A reverse proxy takes all your web-based services, e.g.
and allows you to map these to domain names, so instead of typing
server.example.com:32400you can typeplex.example.com. I have simplified this quite a bit though - you need DNS configured as well, and depending on your requirements you may want to purchase a domain name if you intend on accessing content from outside your home without a self hosted VPN.Cloudflare is a DDoS mitigation service, a caching web proxy, and a DNS nameserver. Most users here would probably be using it for Dynamic DNS. You can use it in combination with a reverse proxy as a means to mask your home IP address from people connecting to your self hosted web-based services remotely, but on its own it cannot be used as a reverse proxy (at least easily - would not recommend attempting to). Do note that Cloudflare can see all the data you transmit through their systems, something to bare in mind if you are privacy conscious.
In my opinion though, it would be much better for you to use a self hosted VPN to access your self hosted services (can be used in combination with the reverse proxy), unless there is a specific need to expose the services out to the internet
Edit: fix minor typo, add extra info about cloudflare
So a reverse proxy is a way to manage subdomains? I read somewhere that it allows multiple different services to be hosted on the same port and I think I know that that is probably a lie.
That's halfway correct - I'll try and break it down a bit further into the various parts.
Your subdomains are managed in using DNS - if you want to create or change a subdomain, that happens here. For each of your services, you'll create a type of DNS entry called an "A record", containing your service's full domain name, and the IP address of your reverse proxy (in this example, it is 10.0.0.1)
The DNS records would look like the following:
With these records created, typing any of these domains in a browser on your network will connect to your reverse proxy on port 80 (assuming we are not using HTTPS here). Your reverse proxy now needs to be set up to know how to respond to these requests coming in to the same port.
In the reverse proxy config, we tell it where the services are running and what port they're running on:
Now when you type the domain names in the browser, your browser looks in DNS for the "A record" we created, and using the IP in that record it will then connect to the reverse proxy 10.0.0.1 at port 80. The reverse proxy looks at the domain name, and then connects you on to that service.
What we've done here is taken all 3 of those web-based services, and put them onto a the same port, 80, using the reverse proxy. As long as the reverse proxy sees a domain name it recognises from its config, it will know what service you want.
One thing to note though, reverse proxies only work with web-based services