How to reverse proxy?

Caddy
It’s three lines of configuration

jellyfin.example.com { reverse_proxy http://localhost:8083/ }
Automatic https with let’sencrypt, simplicity of a single binary, downgrade is as simple as replace binary & restart service.
- Fucking hell why do I use Apache 😂
  
  Because you love the pain that comes with pulling your own hair out, one fistful at a time.
- How does my DNS know where to look for this?
  
  you rent a domain
  in the config (provided by the service where you rented the domain) you set it to point to the IP of the device where you run caddy
  the service tells the relevant global DNS servers your setting
  your DNS does a DNS lookup and a DNS server returns the IP you configured it to point to
  Depending on the DNS you use, you can manually add entries to do 1-3 differently, but that will only work for devices that use your DNS and is hard.
  
  if you don't want to rent a domain, but you run a local DNS server (pihole, technitium) for filtering or other reasons, you can register your own domain names in there, for free. but don't use common TLDs to avoid conflicts, and leave ".local" alone too because that's used by mdns/avahi. You may use .home, .lan, or a few others I don't know without looking them up
- Wow

I use Nginx Proxy Manager running as a docker container. Its a gui that makes administration more straight forward. It points at all my services (docker and otherwise) and handles the SSL for me. Because I don't want to have any ports open I use DNS challenge ACME and NPM has built in support for a number APIs from large public DNS providers to automate that.
- This plus technitium DNS is exactly my approach.
- i have nginx proxy manager set up all as well, but haven’t worked out the SSL part yet, so all my internal docker services are still on http
  out of interest, how did you set up https with npm?
  
  First set up your certificate in the SSL tab of NPM. You can either upload a traditional certificate or set up LetsEncrypt. Be aware that starting next spring the maximum length of a certificate will drop to 9 months and continue to decrease over the next few years until its 47 days.
  I have mine set up so LetsEncrypt gets a wildcard cert for my domain (via DNS challenge). Some people go with per subdomain certs.
  Once you have the cert, go you each of your hosts and switch to its SSL tab. Then select your cert. Then I usually turn on "Force SSL"

I prefer doing nginx on the host (vs a container), & have different configs for each service. You can have multiple services on the same port, it can be controlled via DNS instead (i.e.: access Jellyfin.domain.com & bitwarden.domain.com, both of 443).
Ive tried Caddy once or twice but couldn’t get it working, so i just stick with nginx & cert or to automatically get certificates from my internal CA
- Yeah but when I last tried nginx on my bitwarden host and another on my jellyfin host i could access the one for bitwarden on port 81 of my server but couldn't access the other nginx web page on port 85 even though i have written it in docker compose file and the port 85 was also open on my server.
  
  It looks like jhdeval mentioned this already, but you may need to review your config file. By default, you would likely have nginx listening on ports 80 & 443 for requests to a specific address (i.e.: jellyfin.domain.com) which would be configured in your DNS, & then nginx would direct the jellfin 443 traffic to port 85 to access Jellyfin. Same principle for Bitwarden. If you have your nginx config files, i \ we could take a look & see if we spot any issues.
- I'm doing the same with Apache in a container. Using Let's Encrypt with DNS challenge for SSL certificate. The DNS records point to the reverse proxy IP which is only accessible via VPN (Tailscale). 😂
  
  nginx + certbot \ acme for certs from my local Step-CA, proper DNS & I just use a WireGuard VPN on-demand for when I leave my house. As soon as I'm off my Wi-Fi I have the VPN active so I don't need to expose anything more than 1 port for that to work =]
  I might look at Tailscale, if only because I've seen plenty of people say that's how they connect, so worth looking into =]

- Yeah, another vote for Caddy. I've run nginx as a reverse proxy before and it wasn't too bad, but Caddy is even easier. Needs naff-all resources too. My ProxMox VM for it has 256 MB of RAM!
- I'll definitely take a look at so thx. Also I'm using duckdns right now so i didn't need to port forward anything but if I use my domain do i need to port forward ports 80&443 from through my router to my debian server (192.168.200.101)?
  
  To access things outside of your LAN (for example from your phone while at the grocery store), each service gets a DuckDNS entry. "service.myduckdns.com" or whatever.
  Your phone will look for service.myduckdns.com on port 443, because you'll have https:// certificates and that all happens on port 443.
  When that request eventually gets to your router and is trying to penetrate your firewall, you'll need 443 open and forwarded to your Debian machine.
  So yes, you have it right.
  Also forward port 80.
  
  You can also choose a mesh vpn like tailscale and then you don't have to worry about ddns or port forwarding at all, ace you can still use a reverse proxy.

IMO, look into the linuxserver.io fork of NGINX, called SWAG.
It comes preloaded with a bunch of fantastic addons for security.
Quite easy to get set up, if you've got an idea about how it works.

There's Nginx proxy manager if you want to set it up. But I'd rather go with Tailscale instead.
- tailscale is not the same as nginx or any reverse proxy, though. I don't expose anything publicly, but I still wouldn't stop using a reverse proxy
  
  Ok, fair enough.

Since your a beginner, youll find nginx proxy manager easiest, it has a nice ui, and at this stage you are probably less intrested in the 10/10 fastest lighweight setup and more intrested in getting stuff working.

Did traefik become uncool? I only read about caddy/nginx/ha here.
- my last experience with it was a half empty documentation, and a config structure that signaled to me that they dropped a lot of features for v2 release that they initially wanted to have, which has additionally made understanding their config structure harder. and that hasn't improved for years.
- I think it's still one of the best solutions.

Nginx Proxy Manager was easy to learn as a beginner. I'd recommend it as a learning tool, if nothing else, and if you want to switch to other solutions later you can.

What is your goal, simplest to configure? industry standard? Secure options set by default? Do you need a gui or are you fine with config files?
- Something secure and easy to understand and setup for beginner. The easier the better. I don't mind writing config files if I can understand it.
  
  Nginx Proxy Manager is probably your best bet at this stage. It’s a simple to use GUI with QOL features like automatic certificate acquisition built on top of the industry standard Nginx. It should do everything you need it to do and it’s hands down the easiest to get started with.
  When you reach the point that you’re trying to do something outside the scope of Nginx Proxy Manager’s gui, that would be a good time to get into another solution that’s config file based. My weapon of choice here is Caddy. I LOVE how simple and minimal the configuration is and it does a lot of things by default that other solutions don’t.
  Plain Nginx is a solid tool but working with it directly will be the least straightforward and beginner friendly of all the solutions. Only reason I’d recommend straight Nginx is if you want experience with it for work.
  Traefik, don’t bother with until you have an actual reason to use it over other solutions (Like you’re getting into clustering or kubernetes or anything else that requires dynamic configuration instead of static.)

A lot of people aren't big fans of Nginx Proxy Manager, which is separate from Nginx. But I like it. It's got a nice gui, and the part I really like is the letsencrypt ssl certs baked in. You can get a new one, for a new service with a click of a button, and it auto renews your certs, so you don't have to worry about it once it's set up.

You'd install one reverse proxy only and make that forward to the individual services. Popular choices include nginx, Caddy and Traefik. I always try to rely on packages from the repository. They're maintained by your distribution and tied into your system. You might want to take a different approach if you use containers, though. I mean if you run everything in Docker, you might want to do the reverse proxy in Docker as well.
That one reverse proxy would get port 443 and 80. All services like Jellyfin, Immich... get random higher ports and your reverse proxy internally connects (and forwards) to those random ports. That's the point of a reverse proxy, to make multiple distinct services available via just one and the same port.
- And if i wanted to install nginx from debian repo and make the config file for immich docker instance, bitwarden dcoker instance... how would the config files and ssl certificates for nginx look like?
  
  Maybe have a look at https://nginxproxymanager.com/ as well. I don't know how difficult it is to install since I never used it, but I heard it has a relatively straight-forward graphical interface.
  Configuring good old plain nginx isn't super complicated. It depends a bit on your specific setup, though. Generally, you'd put config files into /etc/nginx/sites-available/servicexyz (or put it in the default)
  
  server { listen 80; server_name jellyfin.yourdomain.com; return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri; } server { listen 443 ssl; server_name jellyfin.yourdomain.com; ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/your_ssl_certificate.crt; ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/your_private_key.key; ssl_protocols TLSv1.2 TLSv1.3; ssl_ciphers 'ECDHE-ECDSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-RSA-AES128-GCM-SHA256:ECDHE-ECDSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384:ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384'; ssl_prefer_server_ciphers on; ssl_session_cache shared:SSL:10m; location / { proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8096/; proxy_http_version 1.1; proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade; proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade'; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade; } access_log /var/log/nginx/jellyfin.yourdomain_access.log; error_log /var/log/nginx/jellyfin.yourdomain_error.log; }
  It's a bit tricky to search for tutorials these days... I got that from: https://linuxconfig.org/setting-up-nginx-reverse-proxy-server-on-debian-linux
  Jellyfin would then take all requests addressed at jellyfin.yourdomain.com and forward that to your Jellyfin which hopefully runs on port 8096. You'd use a similar file like this for each service, just adapt them to the internal port and domain.
  You can also have all of this on a single domain (and not sub-domains). That'd be the difference between "jellyfin.yourdomain.com" and "yourdomain.com/jellyfin". That's accomplished with one file with a single "server" block in it, but make it several "location" blocks within, like location /jellyfin
  Alright, now that I wrote it down, it certainly requires some knowledge. If that's too much and all the other people here recommend Caddy, maybe have a look at that as well. It seems to be packaged in Debian, too.
  Edit: Oh yes, and you probably want to set up Letsencrypt so you connect securely to your services. The reverse proxy would be responsible for encryption.
  Edit2: And many projects have descriptions in their documentation. Jellyfin has documentation on some major reverse proxies: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/post-install/networking/advanced/nginx
  
  That question is a little bit out of the scope of a forum like this. A question like that would better be answered by the nginx documentation. Sometimes the project documentation might have a blurb about nginx configuration specific for that project. For example, Immich.
  For the most part, you only have to reference the nginx documentation. I've never looked at the Immich config above until now, and my Immich server works great.
  I've had a reverse proxy for years, but the config files are very foreign to me because I use Nginx-Proxy-Manager. NPM makes nginx usable for dummies like me, at the expense of gaining a deeper understanding of how it works. I'm ok with that, but you might feel differently.

Reverse proxying was tricky for me, I started with Nginx Proxy Manager and it started out fine, was able to reverse proxy my services in the staging phase however, once I tried to get production SSL/TLS certificates it kept running into errors (this was a while ago I can’t remember exactly) so that pushed me to SWAG and swag worked great! Reverse proxying was straight forward, SSL/TLS certificates worked well however, overall it felt slow, so now I’m using Traefik and so far have no complaints.
It’s honestly whatever works for you and what you prefer having.

I know this is beyond the scope of your question but you are at a very similar place like i was over a year ago.
For the reverse proxy you want ingnx manager and it will handle all of your reverse proxies just fine.
But what i really want to recommend is to change up that debian into proxmox,
Proxmox is a debian based efficient server OS. Basically every service you run now can Easily be run as its own isolated container with very little overhang.
Best of all there is a community for Helper script that will install entire services including Nginx but even nextcloud from a single command.
https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts?id=nginxproxymanager
- Thx I appreciate the input. I have already a lot of things set up on the server and switching now would be painful and time consuming. I also use docker in conjunction with kvm-qemu and had I known about proxmox a month ago I would not have construct it at such but alas. I will however in the future get another hardware which I will use as a home server and I will definitely give proxmox a shot.
  Unrealted but Alpine Linux is based af!

I recommend Caddy. It's very easy to deploy, and configuring it is a snap. This tutorial helped me out a bunch. There is a Docker version of Caddy, tho I have never used it. I figured, Caddy would do better installed on bare metal. I use Caddy in conjunction with Duckdns.org. Caddy also takes care of renewing your certs when it's time.

I was new to doing reverse proxy stuff but Nginx Proxy Manager made it really easy. A bit of doc reading, I probably watched a video or two, and it all made sense. Great clean UI and easy to install. (I run it on a Raspberry Pi.)

See here https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=selfhost%3Anginx
My notes and my approach, so YMMV

This video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlcVx-k-02E or this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx6T6lqX-QM That is all you need to know to successfully set it up. They are really good. Good luck! 😊

Nginx, caddy and haproxy are 3 choice for reverse proxy. The way a reverse proxy works is it looks on port 80 and 443 for requests to a DNS connection. Like say you want to go to jellyfin you may have a DNS entry for jellyfin.personalsite.tld the reverse proxy will then take that and redirect the connection to the proper port and server behind your firewall. You do not need multiple reverse proxies. In the case of haproxy and nginx (only ones I have experience with) you create a "back end connection" like explained above and it will redirect. In the case of nginx it is very small I installed it natively and setup configs for each of my services for easy maintenance.
- Okay and in that case can you please point me in the right direction how should i write the nginx configs for each of my services and also make ssl certificates?

This may be a controversial approach, but I recently had to set up reverse proxy along with DNS configuration and certificate handling. I pair programmed with an LLM.
My experience was this... I described what I wanted to set up, my objectives (like containerisation, zero touch deployment, idempotence, etc) and it gave me a starting point. It threw a few bad ideas in but I also asked it to help me stress test against the objectives. I think it's all just about working now. I learned a lot about shell, docker, nginx, terraform, VM metadata, data persistence, pulling it all in from a git repo, bootstrapping nginx with self-signed certificates, auto renewal, vscode devcontainers and more. Honestly I'm worried about what a pro would make of my code, but I made huge steps in a relatively short time. Disclaimer: I am a software engineer who was keen to learn this stuff and get moving quickly.
I would definitely consider this approach if you're new to the area.

While using a web server before your self hosted micro services is the obvious answer and caddy the easier to configure, as a beginner you should also consider taiscale funnels. You dont need to mess with router stuff like port forward or caring if you ISP have your router behind a cgnat which is kinda norm nowadays , also dont have to care for a domain name dynamic DNS stuff . You could have a look to my quick how to . All you need is running a script , the ports and desired names of your subdomains and your tailscale auth key. https://ippocratis.github.io/tailscale/
- Well I already got static IP from my ISP and configured Wireguard on my directly on my router so I think I'm good.
  
  The funnel exposes your local services to the public over https . Like what you want to accomplish with reverse proxy . Its just more straightforward for a beginner.
  Personally I closed my router ports and switched to tailscalr funnels after using caddy with mutual TLS for years.