finally got everything to work

I finally managed to put all the pieces together.

For the longest time, I’ve been trying a variety of #selfhosted options, like Tailscale (VPN-access), Cloudflare Tunnel (reverse proxy managed by Cloudflare), etc. Today, I managed to set-up a self-hosted server. Granted, it isn’t a completely self-managed solution: I didn’t write an nginx config file by hand; I didn’t do any of the certificate stuff myself - but it’s closer than I’ve ever gotten. Documenting it here:

• Ran the docker container.
• Set up port-forwarding on my router:
  • Opened ports 80 and 443. Router forwards that to my machine’s private IP
  • Machine’s private IP is a reserved, static IP
• Pointed DNS records to my router’s public IP e.g. subdomain.domain.tld to xxx.xx.xxx.xxx as an DNS-only A record
• Set up a proxy host on nginx-proxy-manager
  • Proxy forwards the request from subdomain.domain.tld to xxx.xxx.x.xxx (private IP) on PORT NUMBER
  • Generate SSL certificate with Let’s Encrypt for HTTPS

There’s probably stuff I need to figure out at some point: like DDNS for if (when) my public IP changes. But goddamn if it doesn’t feel good 😭