Today I decided to get an inexpensive custom domain from Namecheap and try self-hosting Lemmy. A few bucks later I was thinking, “Hey, this is going to be cake.”
I’d read some of the warnings about Oracle Cloud free tier, but figured I’d still give it a shot for hosting. I found a simple how-to for quickly getting an Ubuntu instance spun up with Docker and Portainer. A few minutes later I’m thinking, “This is so easy!”
Then I try to access Portainer using HTTPS and see my first “Your connection is not private,” warning. “No worries,” I think. “Advanced>Proceed. I’m in.”
So I run Lemmy Easy Deploy. “The lights are green, the trap is clean! Boom. Here we go!”
Nothing.
Ports seem to be open on Oracle, but no Lemmy at either 80 or 443.
“Maybe Lemmy is more particular about SSL certificates and such?” I think, for the first time getting worried.
"Err, I think that if I change my nameserver to Cloudflare I can destroy my Lemmy containers, re-run Lemmy Easy Deploy with a Cloudflare API token, and maybe fix it?
Four hours later, after repeatedly starting over, clearing my browser cache every 5 minutes, switching back and forth between nameservers, even deleting the whole Oracle Cloud VM and starting from scratch, I realize that an HTTP connection to port 443 is returning “Client sent an HTTP request to an HTTPS server.”
“Were you there before, message?” I wonder.
Lemmy friends, can you help me? Or am I better off just deleting the VM and giving up the whole idea?
No, most browsers will do what they’re told. At least with nginx, you have to set up a server to listen on port 80 and send a 301 permanently redirected message with the https URL.
Ah, maybe I wasn’t clear enough, caddy doesn’t need a configuration to redirect traffic from port 80 to port 443, it does it automatically: https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https
If you want to configure an http only site you need to specifically configure it in your Caddyfile.
Here’s an example for a reverse proxy
# We don't specify the protocol so Caddy assumes HTTPS and redirects any HTTP to secure.
secure.example.com { reverse_proxy :<port> }
# HTTP is specified so Caddy won't redirect to port 443 nor generate a certificate.
http://insecure.example.com { reverse_proxy :<port> }
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !selfhosted@lemmy.world
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:
Be civil: we’re here to support and learn from one another. Insults won’t be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
No spam posting.
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.
Don’t duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
No trolling.
Resources:
selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
yea it might just be missing a proper http -> https redirect, not sure how to do that in Caddy cause I only know nginx.
Caddy auto redirects to https as long as you don’t add “http://” to the domain.
That sounds more like your browser, not caddy.
No, most browsers will do what they’re told. At least with nginx, you have to set up a server to listen on port 80 and send a 301 permanently redirected message with the https URL.
Ah, maybe I wasn’t clear enough, caddy doesn’t need a configuration to redirect traffic from port 80 to port 443, it does it automatically: https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https
If you want to configure an http only site you need to specifically configure it in your Caddyfile.
Here’s an example for a reverse proxy
Yeah, I figured that’s what you meant after rereading it. Chrome at least does automatically switch to HTTPS in some cases, like where it’s seen HSTS.