this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
15 points (100.0% liked)

Selfhosted

42858 readers
2177 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
ruud
Loki
CannaVet
devve
HybridSarcasm
[email protected]
15
How do I point a reverse proxy to a VPN client on my VPS? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 15 hours ago by [email protected] to c/selfhosted
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I have a few things that I host from my house. I have read that it's better practice to route stuff through a VPS to not expose your home IP.

Here's what I've done so far: VPN setup on VPS with successful routing of containers. Confirmed by using a CLI IP check within the container which returned the VPS IP. I used PiVPN because I know it and it's easy to set up.

Where I got stuck: I pointed Nginx to the supposed IP:port of the connection, but couldn't get it to load.

What should I do next?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

VPN setup on VPS with successful routing of containers. Confirmed by using a CLI IP check within the container which returned the VPS IP

If you want to route traffic from the VPS over the VPN, and the check returned the IP address of the VPS, this confirms it is not working. You need to configure your VPS to route traffic over the VPN. Personally, I've done this in the reverse direction (routing local qbittorrent to a public VPN) with gluetun.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I think you got it reversed. I want the container traffic to go through the VPN to the VPS and I want the reverse proxy on the VPS to point to that container.

I want the website (hosted at my house) to be accessible through the VPS so my IP isn't directly exposed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

You've confirmed I've understood it correctly. Someone on the Internet requests your site. They reach your VPS with nginx. So far so good. Now, how does nginx know how to reach the upstream service?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

The goal is to route the services through the VPN and point Nginx to them... but it doesn't work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Right. How are you routing traffic from nginx?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

For the services already hosted by the VPS, I just point service.web.site to the appropriate localhost:port.

My hiccup is that the VPN software (pivpn) gives me an internal IP for the clients but pointing Nginx to that IP doesn't work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

The nginx host is the VPN client in this case, so it'd be connecting to itself. You need to point it to the host on the VPN server side network.