this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
91 points (93.3% liked)

Selfhosted

40359 readers
383 users here now

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:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. 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.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] lemann@lemmy.dbzer0.com 54 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (11 children)

A reverse proxy takes all your web-based services, e.g.

  • plex on port 32400
  • octoprint on port 8000
  • transmission on port 8888

and allows you to map these to domain names, so instead of typing server.example.com:32400 you can type plex.example.com. I have simplified this quite a bit though - you need DNS configured as well, and depending on your requirements you may want to purchase a domain name if you intend on accessing content from outside your home without a self hosted VPN.

Cloudflare is a DDoS mitigation service, a caching web proxy, and a DNS nameserver. Most users here would probably be using it for Dynamic DNS. You can use it in combination with a reverse proxy as a means to mask your home IP address from people connecting to your self hosted web-based services remotely, but on its own it cannot be used as a reverse proxy (at least easily - would not recommend attempting to). Do note that Cloudflare can see all the data you transmit through their systems, something to bare in mind if you are privacy conscious.

In my opinion though, it would be much better for you to use a self hosted VPN to access your self hosted services (can be used in combination with the reverse proxy), unless there is a specific need to expose the services out to the internet

Edit: fix minor typo, add extra info about cloudflare

[–] arudesalad@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Also, could a reverse proxy be used to give cloudflare's services to a port they don't support?

[–] Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yes, typically the proxy will listen on 443/80 and all the services it proxies to just use their defaults.

For example: emby.example.tld, port 443 > cloudflare, port 443 > your reverse proxy, port 443 > emby, port 8096

All the client sees is emby.example.tld on port 443 and the resulting web application, everything in between is transparent.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)