this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
48 points (98.0% liked)

Selfhosted

39964 readers
339 users here now

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.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Hi all. Noob question/s here. I want to be able to access my Immich server (docker) externally and maybe set up some others (e.g. Mealio). My understanding is that I need (should) use NGINX reverse proxy for this. My questions are:

  1. Do I need to set up NGINX on a VPS (or similar cloud based server) to send the queries to my home box?

  2. Do I need to purchase a domain (randomblahblah.xyz) to use as the main access route from outside my house?

Thanks a lot.

top 19 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] dataprolet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  1. No, the reverse proxy should be running in your home network and redirects queries it gets on the usual http(s) ports to your applications.
  2. No, you just need a DynDNS service which provides you with a basic domain like myfancyserver.dyndnsprovider.com.
[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My recommendation for a free dynamic DNS service goes for https://freedns.afraid.org/

[–] fiddlestix@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks. Annoyingly, perhaps, I've just signed up for a year of NextDNS.

[–] fiddlestix@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Thanks. I'm still a bit confused about the domain stuff, but I'm looking into it.

[–] TCB13@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
  1. If you've a public IP address at your home and you can setup port forwards at your router then you don't need a VPS.
  2. Check the post by @dataprolet@lemmy.world
[–] fiddlestix@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks, I'm going to try this.

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
DNS Domain Name Service/System
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
HTTPS HTTP over SSL
IP Internet Protocol
Plex Brand of media server package
SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)

7 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.

[Thread #86 for this sub, first seen 28th Aug 2023, 12:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] 3PO40K@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm still relatively new to NGINX Proxy Manager myself, but I'll give your questions a shot. It doesn't matter how (or where) you host your proxy instance, what matters is that the requests can get to it so that it can forward them to the correct resources. So simple answer to question one is no you can host locally.

If you host it locally you need to make sure that you forward requests that come into your network on to the proxy to be routed correctly. This is where port forwarding comes into play. You'll need to set your router to take any requests that come in on port 80 or 443 (HTTP and HTTPS) and send those to your proxy.

As for question two do you need to purchase a domain. You can use a free domain name or you can pay for one that part doesn't matter. The domain isn't a technical requirement until you want to start hardening your instances with SSL. To get a cert you'll need a domain. But if you set up your port forwarding and a proxy you could send a request to some_subdomain.123.456.789.123:80 (your external IP) and the proxy server will take thar request and translate it to the local server mapped to some_subdomain.

[–] fiddlestix@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks, I'm going to try the port forwarding part. That seems like the simplest step. NPM looks very useful though.

[–] Spazztastik@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] fiddlestix@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

This looks really useful. Thanks!

[–] techgearwhips@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Just use Cloudflare Tunnels if you're opening it up to the Internet.

Use tailscale if only using your own personal devices.

Both easy to setup in 5 minutes.

[–] u_tamtam@programming.dev 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why keep giving cloudflare a monopoly of the internet traffic? Isn't the whole self-hosting movement about breaking out of the tech giants' shenanigans and promoting a healthy alternative with a decentralized and robust internet?

[–] techgearwhips@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I honestly don't care. I just self host as a way to not be locked into google specifically. So if I ever do decide to switch to something else outside of Cloudflare or Tailscale, I can. By the way, I tried to set up Wireguard and I felt like I had to have a degree in engineering to get it to work. Then I tried wg-easy and that didn't work. Went to the github and seen it had like 300 issues. I like stuff that just works and I don't have to spend hours tinkering with.

[–] fiddlestix@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Replying to my own comment to say thanks again for all the tips and advice. I got it all sorted with Tailscale. The final piece of the puzzle!