I have self hosted immich on Debian on my homelab. I have also setup tailscale to be able to access it outside my home.
Sometime ago, I was able to purchase a domain of my choice from GoDaddy. While I am used to hosting stuff on Linux, I’ve never exposed it for access publicly. I want to do that now.
Is it something I can do within tailscale or do I need to setup something like cloudflare? What should I be searching for to learn and implement? What precautions to take? I would like to keep the tailscale thing too.
You use a reverse proxy. Configure your DNS (GoDaddy in this case) to forward requests to your domain to your WAN IP. Set up port forwarding on your router to send HTTPS requests to your server, then the reverse proxy processes the request and directs it to the proper container.
This is honestly the most confusing and complicated part of self-hosting.
It’s also all made very simple using Yunohost.
Also please move away from GoDaddy as soon as possible. Popular alternatives would be NameCheap or Porkbun.
I have used reverse proxy in office setup where my local IP was NATed to a dedicated public IP. But in my home lab, I don’t have a dedicated public IP. So, i need to figure a way around that.
Just run a cron job updating your IP every 24 hours. All I’ve ever done for the last decade or so.
I should clarify, I use namecheap as my registrar and Afraid as my nameserver. Afraid has curl, cron and even just a url i think you can use to update your IP.
Absolutely, if it was anything I needed or even really wanted to be sure was reliably available I’d never put it on a free VPS.
Now, something trivial like this that just requires installing wireguard and nginx, copying over some configs, and changing a DNS record? Hard to beat free.
I’ve set up several instances in circumstances like yours. The easiest way is to create a duckdns domain for yourself, and install their updater on one of your systems, to keep your external IP up to date with their DNS-Servers. Then you can use a DNS-Provider of your choice (I use Cloudflare) to create a “CNAME” DNS Record, that basically just tells a browser to redirect from your domain to the IP Address of the duckdns domain. That way you can have an automatically updating public IP behind your domain name. Then you “just” have to set up a reverse proxy (I use Nginx Proxy Manager, but there are newer and easier alternatives), and create the correct port forwarding rules in your router/firewall, and you should be good to go
If you have a dynamic WAN IP (like I do), you can make use of DDNS-updater services such as this.
Also, afaik, Immich does not have chunked uploads yet (not sure if it has been updated to include that) so you might have to check your DNS’ policies regarding traffic (e.g. Cloudflare proxy only allows up to 100Mb traffic and can’t be used to serve media from what I read).
This is honestly the most confusing and complicated part of self-hosting.
I agree! It took me years to finally decide to buckle down and wrap my head around what a “reverse proxy” is. Once I figured it out things became so much more usable and fun.
Combined with DNS redirects in my LAN (to get around NAT loopback), things are very easy to use.
You sound like me with Docker. Still unsure how to use that shit but haven’t sat down to really try again, either.
I agree, reverse proxy was also a little mind numbing before I really buckled down and read/watched a bunch of info on it. I learn best by examples and try-fail, but that’s hard to do with live services.
You need to pick a machine (if you only have 1 you don’t lol) to be your web portal, bang a block of code in via ssh or command line (I copy pasted) then you can access Portainer via the web portal.
From there “Stacks” is Docker Compose and you can fiddle with your containers, networking settings and all the other stuff via a UI instead of having to SSH in all the time to look at your compose files.
Then if you wanna use docker on more machines you just bang a block of code into that machine via ssh and it will appear in your Portainer
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You use a reverse proxy. Configure your DNS (GoDaddy in this case) to forward requests to your domain to your WAN IP. Set up port forwarding on your router to send HTTPS requests to your server, then the reverse proxy processes the request and directs it to the proper container.
This is honestly the most confusing and complicated part of self-hosting.
It’s also all made very simple using Yunohost.
Also please move away from GoDaddy as soon as possible. Popular alternatives would be NameCheap or Porkbun.
I have used reverse proxy in office setup where my local IP was NATed to a dedicated public IP. But in my home lab, I don’t have a dedicated public IP. So, i need to figure a way around that.
Just run a cron job updating your IP every 24 hours. All I’ve ever done for the last decade or so.
I should clarify, I use namecheap as my registrar and Afraid as my nameserver. Afraid has curl, cron and even just a url i think you can use to update your IP.
Thank you! I’ll look into it.
I know everyone loves to shit on Oracle, but a free-tier Oracle VPS would solve this.
Or if you want something decent pay for a cheap VPS.
We’re running home labs because we’ve learned that relying on “free” services eventually comes back to bite you.
Absolutely, if it was anything I needed or even really wanted to be sure was reliably available I’d never put it on a free VPS.
Now, something trivial like this that just requires installing wireguard and nginx, copying over some configs, and changing a DNS record? Hard to beat free.
I’ve set up several instances in circumstances like yours. The easiest way is to create a duckdns domain for yourself, and install their updater on one of your systems, to keep your external IP up to date with their DNS-Servers. Then you can use a DNS-Provider of your choice (I use Cloudflare) to create a “CNAME” DNS Record, that basically just tells a browser to redirect from your domain to the IP Address of the duckdns domain. That way you can have an automatically updating public IP behind your domain name. Then you “just” have to set up a reverse proxy (I use Nginx Proxy Manager, but there are newer and easier alternatives), and create the correct port forwarding rules in your router/firewall, and you should be good to go
This is the way.
If you have a dynamic WAN IP (like I do), you can make use of DDNS-updater services such as this.
Also, afaik, Immich does not have chunked uploads yet (not sure if it has been updated to include that) so you might have to check your DNS’ policies regarding traffic (e.g. Cloudflare proxy only allows up to 100Mb traffic and can’t be used to serve media from what I read).
I agree! It took me years to finally decide to buckle down and wrap my head around what a “reverse proxy” is. Once I figured it out things became so much more usable and fun.
Combined with DNS redirects in my LAN (to get around NAT loopback), things are very easy to use.
You sound like me with Docker. Still unsure how to use that shit but haven’t sat down to really try again, either.
I agree, reverse proxy was also a little mind numbing before I really buckled down and read/watched a bunch of info on it. I learn best by examples and try-fail, but that’s hard to do with live services.
I found a lot of the problems I had with Docker were with Docker. Once I moved to using Portainer for Docker it became much more accessible.
I’ll take a look at it, thanks!
You need to pick a machine (if you only have 1 you don’t lol) to be your web portal, bang a block of code in via ssh or command line (I copy pasted) then you can access Portainer via the web portal.
From there “Stacks” is Docker Compose and you can fiddle with your containers, networking settings and all the other stuff via a UI instead of having to SSH in all the time to look at your compose files.
Then if you wanna use docker on more machines you just bang a block of code into that machine via ssh and it will appear in your Portainer
Far easier imho
I have saved this reply for the near future when I rebuild my server box to run Linux! Thanks again for your knowledge and information!