Selfhosted

If you have your own DNS server you can set a hostname there like 'jellyfin.myserver' and have that accessible from your internal network. If you want to do so on your PC you can edit your hosts file to add a custom entry. https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/how-to-edit-hosts-file

I use a pi hole instance for this. I just point all the subdomains at my ngnix server and reverse proxy everything through that

I use pihole running on an esxi server for dns. In pihole you can create local dns records which is exactly what you’re trying to do. It’s very lightweight, you can run it on about anything.

You can also do something like this

PiHole as your DNS resolver. LocalDNS mapping whatever hostname you want to whatever IP you want.
Because I use Nginx Proxy Manager internally - then most of my hostname point to the Nginx IP address

Wolfangs Channel had a video about that a few weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlcVx-k-02E

I didn't try it myself yet, but judging from his other videos, he's not a complete idiot, so I assume it's solid advice.

You'll need certs if you want to use a Chromecast in certain circumstances, btw.

Running a reverse proxy then adding your IP to your router/other-DNS-server will make it easy ish. Just don’t pick a domain that is used by other people. If you have a(ny) domain you own then a subdomain you set in your router is fine/safe.

I have *.[house domain] point to a static IP set in my router. The IP is announced via BGP to point to running Traefik instances as a reverse proxy that points to the appropriate container. This also gives certs, but isn’t required.

You need to set up a local DNS server with a .servername zone and point your machines to it. You'd add an external DNS server like 1.1.1.1 as forwarder to allow internet traffic to still resolve.

You should be able to use mDNS pretty easily. Some services (like Home Assistant) support it out-of-the-box. mDNS is what powers the .local domains (eg homeassistant.local).

You can configure a local only DNS

You can add an entry to your /etc/hosts file for the IP part, but this cannot remove the need to specify the port number as it is unrelated to the domain/IP

After much suffering with local zones (mainly due to stubborn devices ignoring dns servers coming via dhcp and retarded corporate vpn messing with resolv.conf) I just use xxx.local.mydomain.tld with a small script that parses the leases files and updates the data via cloud flare api.

After much suffering with local zones (mainly due to stubborn devices ignoring dns servers coming via dhcp and retarded corporate vpn messing with resolv.conf) I just use xxx.local.mydomain.tld with a small script that parses the leases files and updates the data via cloud flare api.

If externally available - i use domain. If local - by ip:port. I find it easier to rely on firefox bookmarks and their folders lol.

I currently use a custom filter/rewrite in AdGuard Home (similar to pihole).

An alternative to running a central dns server is to use mDNS. You can install a daemon on each server that you want to access via hostname, and then clients know that ServerName.local domains should be resolved using mdns. They send out a dns query to a local multicast IP, the daemon on the servers receives the query and the appropriate one responds. By design it’s local only.

There are a lot of comments, and I didn’t feel like reading them all to see if someone said this, but you could use pi-hole to host a dns server on your network that forwards requests to a normal dns server but has a list of custom exceptions. This could be used for that as well as being a great ad blocker for any device that lets you change dns settings. (This includes a lot of smart tvs and things)

Theres a few ways to do that but this is the easiest way it to use a caddy reverse proxy & a local dns server (like pihole or adgarud home)

register servername.local in pihole/adguard https://discourse.pi-hole.net/t/howto-using-pi-hole-as-lan-dns-server/533

example caddyfile:

# you must set 'http://' or caddy may error when getting a ssl cert
http://jellyfin.servername.local {
  reverse_proxy 192.168.1.100:8096
}