this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
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Selfhosted

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Selfhosting behind VPN? (self.selfhosted)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by stonesimulator to c/selfhosted
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I have played around with yunohost and other similar tools. I know how to open ports on router, configure port forwarding. I am also interested on hosting my own stuff for experiments, but I also have a VPN enabled for privacy reasons on my router at all times. If you haven't guessed already, I am very reserved on revealing my home IP for selfhosting, as contradictory as it sounds.

I am aware that it's better to rent a VPS, not to mention the dynamic IP issues, but here it goes: assuming my VPN provider permits port forwarding, is it possible to selfhost anything from behind a VPN, including the virtual machine running all the necessary softwares?

edit: title

edit2: I just realized my VPN provider is discontinuing port forwarding next month. Why?!

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[–] Mountaineer 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Absolutely possible.
The key to simple self hosting is to have a dns record that points to your externally accessible IP, whether that be your real one or an external one hosted at a VPN provider.
If that IP changes, you'll need to update it dynamically.

It's becoming increasibly common to be a requirement to do so as CGNat becomes more widespread.

One of the newer ways to do that is with a Cloudflare Tunnel, which whilst technically is only for web traffic, they ignore low throughput usage for other things like SSH.

[–] stonesimulator 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My knowledge is a little dated and I remember messing around dyndns or noip to update my IP many years ago. I guess a simple script running on the router or the host should suffice?

[–] Mountaineer 2 points 1 year ago

I personally use a bash script triggered by cron on my server to first determine my external IP address: curl http://v4.ident.me/ then if it differed from the last check, would update one of my dns entries via the godaddy API.

This can be a simple or as complicated as you like.