I’m going round in circles on this one.

What I want to do is:

  • serve up my self-hosted apps with https (to local clients only - nothing over the open web)
  • address them as ‘app.server.lan’ or ‘sever.lan/app’
  • preferably host whatever is needed in docker

I think this is achievable with a reverse proxy, some kind of DNS server and self-signed certs. I’m not a complete noob but my knowledge in this area is lacking. I’ve done a fair bit of research but I’m probably not using the right terminology or whatever.

Would anyone have a link to a good guide that covers this?

  • Elvith Ma'for@feddit.orgEnglish
    13·
    1 day ago

    I have this setup. I bought a domain (say homeserver.tld) from a registrar that allows zone edits with an API. Then I use certbot with a plugin that supports my registrar to get real Let’s Encrypt certificates. Usually Let’s encrypt connects to your server to ensure that it responds to the domain you’re requesting a certificate for, but this challenge can also be done by editing the DNS record of your domain to prove ownership. That is called DNS-01 challenge and is useful of your domain is not publicly reachable. Google for certbot DNS-01 your registrar to find some documentation.

    Some of the VMs/LXC now get certificates for a specific subdomain (“some-app.homeserver.tld”), other just get a wildcard certificate (“*.homeserver.tld”) - e.g. my docker host.

    • robador51@lemmy.mlEnglish
      4·
      1 day ago

      I do the same. I have a real domain and certbot does a dns challenge. It was a little fiddly and took a moment to figure out, i think that was because i couldn’t gat caddy to work, but traefik worked a charm. Self signing is more complex i think because you’ll need to accept the root in every client (browsers especially?), which is even more fiddly.

      • Elvith Ma'for@feddit.orgEnglish
        1·
        16 hours ago

        Yeah, that’s exactly why I didn’t use my own CA. There’s a plethora of devices that you now need to import the CA to and then you need to hope, that every application uses the system cert store and doesn’t roll its own (IIRC e.g. Firefox uses its own cert store and doesn’t use the system cert store. Same for every java based application,…)

        It’s fiddly with Caddy, as you need a specific plugin to get it to work with anything else than the default challenge. That means using a custom build via caddy - and with docker, you’re SOL. BUT you can just use certbot and point caddy to the cert file in your file system.