SpaceCadet

Love that the tesla coil comes straight out of Red Alert

You can use the wildcard domain

Yeah the problem was more that this machine is running on a network where I don't really control the DNS. That is to say, there's a shitty ISP router with DHCP and automatic dynamic DNS baked in, but no way to add additional manual entries for vhosts.

I thought about screwing with the /etc/hosts file to get around it but what I ended up doing instead is installing a pihole docker for DNS (something I had been contemplating anyway), pointing it to the router's DNS, so every local DNS name still resolves, and then added manual entries for the vhosts.

Another issue I didn't really want to deal with was regenerating the TLS certificate for the nginx server to make it valid for every vhost, but I just bit through that bullet.

I was afraid it was going to come down to that. I have been looking into configuration options for the apps, but they're 3rd party nodejs apps and I know jack shit about nodejs so I've had no luck with it so far.

Going with vhosts anyway (despite the pains it will create on this setup) seems to be the preferred way forward then.

Thanks for the insight, and for confirming what I already suspected.

No worries, your input was helpful and informative anyway, so thanks.

Going with vhosts anyway seems to be the least cumbersome route at this point.

Hmm no, that's not really it... that's more so that you don't pass URLs starting with /app1/ onwards to the application, which would not be aware of that subpath.

I think I need something that intercepts the content being served to the client, and inserts /app1/ into all hardcoded absolute paths.

For example, let's say on app1's root I have an index.html that contains:

...
src="/static/image.jpg"
...

It should be dynamically served as:

...
src="/app1/static/image.jpg"
...

Ok, so you don't know what FUD means.

You can disagree with the comment above, but it's not "FUD", it's just criticism.

Yeah, I evaluated both when I chose this solution several years ago. Don't ask me why I chose one over the other though, I don't remember.

I use deluge mainly because it can easily be run as a daemon inside of a docker container, so I can just let my torrents run unattended on my homeserver, and always protected by a VPN with killswitch.

On my desktop I use the GUI client to connect to the daemon and manage my torrents as if it were local.

If you really want to get anal about it, yes I know there things like CNAME, PTR and MX records too but that's outside of the scope of this discussion.

DNS doesn't deal with ports, there's no way to say: homelab.example.com should point to IP address 1.2.3.4 and port 12400.

Sure, but the point is not so much about which one to use but that the terminating point listening on 443 should sit outside of his network.

So he will either need a cloud service, or accept that he will have to add :12400 to his URLs.

DNS doesn't deal with ports, it resolves hostnames to IP addresses and that's it.

What you probably need is some kind of reverse proxy that sits outside of your network, listens on port 443 and then directs it to your home IP address on port 12400.