this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2025
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Beginners Questions about Audiobookshelf, DNS and nginx (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 4 days ago by TheBlindPew@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Hey all, I'm relatively new to the selfhosting game the most I've done to date is own and maintain a plex server for the last few years, but that mainly handles all of the networking for me so I'd say it doesn't really count.

Recently, due in part to the ongoing controversy with audibles royalty and streaming model I've decided to try my hand at setting up an Audiobookshelf server of my own. For reference I'm running on a machine with Ubuntu 20.04. Ive managed to get Audiobookshelf and nginx running through docker and accessible via the localhost:port, but now I feel like I'm missing some key understandings.

I assume I need to have a domain name through a DNS service like cloudflare in order to make use of it, but I'm not sure what to do after that and the documentation that I have read doesn't outright answer my questions.

Once I have my DNS setup, how do I associate it with my server or point it through the nginx reverse proxy?

I know I'll have to setup a .conf file for nginx at some point and I found the example .conf in the audiobookshelf documentation, but I just feel like I'm missing the step between getting a domain name and establishing the reverse proxy.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

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[–] mountaincalledmonkey@sopuli.xyz 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Not familiar with cloudflare. But generally speaking, purchase and register a domain and point the DNS to cloudflare. Configure the A record of your domain to your home's public IP address. In your firewall you want to set up a translation rule to send any traffic on a port you assign externally to whatever IP and port your nginx server is internally.

You can also consider not exposing any of your services publicly - keeping your home server more secure. Instead set up a wireguard (or other) VPN, expose just that and point your domain or subdomain to it. Then, while you're away, connect to your VPN and have your audiobookshelf client on your phone connect to you lan IP address /port.

[–] TheBlindPew@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 4 days ago

I had considered the VPN route, but i think its enough of a technical hurdle for other people that it would stop my parents and friends from being able/willing to get onto the audiobookshelf server