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

Selfhosted

40183 readers
697 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
[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago

That's halfway correct - I'll try and break it down a bit further into the various parts.

Your subdomains are managed in using DNS - if you want to create or change a subdomain, that happens here. For each of your services, you'll create a type of DNS entry called an "A record", containing your service's full domain name, and the IP address of your reverse proxy (in this example, it is 10.0.0.1)

The DNS records would look like the following:

  • plex.example.com, 10.0.0.1
  • octoprint.example.com, 10.0.0.1
  • transmission.example.com, 10.0.0.1

With these records created, typing any of these domains in a browser on your network will connect to your reverse proxy on port 80 (assuming we are not using HTTPS here). Your reverse proxy now needs to be set up to know how to respond to these requests coming in to the same port.

In the reverse proxy config, we tell it where the services are running and what port they're running on:

  • plex.example.com is at server.example.com:32400
  • octoprint.example.com is at server.example.com:8000
  • transmission.example.com is at server.example.com:8888

Now when you type the domain names in the browser, your browser looks in DNS for the "A record" we created, and using the IP in that record it will then connect to the reverse proxy 10.0.0.1 at port 80. The reverse proxy looks at the domain name, and then connects you on to that service.

What we've done here is taken all 3 of those web-based services, and put them onto a the same port, 80, using the reverse proxy. As long as the reverse proxy sees a domain name it recognises from its config, it will know what service you want.

One thing to note though, reverse proxies only work with web-based services