Hey all,
So I’ve been playing with Nginx so that I can reference my self hosted services internally by hostname rather than by IP and port.
I set some custom entries in my pihole, setup the proxies on Nxing, and boom. All is working as expected. I can access Jellyfin via jellyfin.homelab, amp via amp.homelab, etc.
I wanted to have all of these internally facing, because I don’t really have a need for them outside of my network, and really just wanted the convenience of referencing them.
Question 1)
If I wanted to add SSL certs to my made up homelab domain, how hard would that be?
Question 2) When accessing something like Jellyfin via jellyfin.homelab, all traffic is then going through my nginx VM, correct? Or is Nginx just acting as a sort of lookup which passes on the correct IP and port information?
in order to add certs you would need a certificate authority, capable of setting up a proper certificate chain. There are several, ranging from the super simple like mkcert to full scale management tools like openCA. The second step is harder and require your consuming apps (the devices and apps that connects to your jellyfin) to trust your CA. An alternative would be to have a proper domain and use LetsEncrypt to get a cert, then trust will work out of the box, but it might also leak information about your private infrastructure.
traffic will go through your proxy
Ah I see. I think I read somewhere that using your own cert requires you to add it to each device that will access said service, which for me is a bit of a deal breaker. I don’t think the rest of the family would be too thrilled; I have to make my projects somewhat transparent to them XD
I use a real domain name, but only have them available internally (and use WireGuard to access them when out and about). You can use letsencrypt with them then because you can validate through DNS.
I see. I have a valid domain as well that I could use, which would make things easier. I guess after I set things up, I can lock down Nginx/ my home lab again, and the certs would still work. My biggest worry was exposing my internal systems to the world.
Yeah. I don’t expose anything other than the WireGuard port.
You can validate the wildcard certificate at your registrar, so you don’t need to open anything up to the world.
Would you need to leave Nginx “online” after setting up the certs? I have mine so that it can’t reach out at all.
Yes, I personally have a valid domain name and then use a wildcart cert so that anything.mydomain.com is valid.
I have a couple domains as well, but was hoping to not rely on anything external for this setup. I’ll think about it. Would definitely make adding SSL a lot easier.