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.
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I have done this before by setting up a Wireguard VPN link between my home server and a VPS, and then running a reverse proxy (such as Caddy) on the VPS, which basically forwarded web requests to my home server. This works well for most things, although there was a definite performance hit by routing traffic through the extra hop.
By using the VPN connection, you wouldn't even need to open a port on your home network which is a great starting point for security as well.
Reverse proxy with caddy?
At the basic level, you could do a reverse ssh tunnel to forward the port from your home server to the VPS, although there’s some efficiency issues doing this iirc, and you’ve got the issue of it failing if the tunnel ever breaks
Reverse SSH... I'll look into it. What I am thinking is that I may be able to run the reverse proxy on the VPS directly, and then direct it towards the nextcloud port in my home network.
If all you're wanting to do is hide your home ip, could you just put it behind cloudflare?
You can setup HTTP reverse proxy on your VPS. You’ll need to point the domain to your VPS for that to work.
What I really want is to be able to host multiple websites with my single home IP without those websites being obviously connected
That’s easy. You have two ways:
to avoid automatic bots constantly looking for vulnerabilities in my home network.
I’m not sure how you would eliminate bots by separating the websites though.
You can set up nginx to do reverse proxy to your home IP, and then limit the traffic on your home IP to the VPS IP.
You can also setup a wireguard VPN between VPS and your home machine, so the traffic between VPS and your home machine is encrypted.
For DNS you just point to the VPS, and manage connections there, and on home network allow only VPS IP to connect. Then manage your security on the VPS.
If you put a wireguad VPN between the VPS and your home machine, you don't have to open any ingress ports. I'm using a similar setup, where the public VM is handling the incoming connections and reverse proxying it to a small private server in my home.
Communication is done via wireguard VPN. I've used Netmaker to create a VPN connections and the mesh, and have VPN profile created on the phone, so I can reach any of the services I don't want exposed on the public internet via private VPN ( example: listening to music via Navidrome, or home Emby server so I can watch stuff when I'm on the move and it is not exposed publicly).
Thanks a lot! This is kind of the configuration that I have converged to, with nginx and WireGuard. The last thing I need to set up correctly is for the SSL handshake to occur between the client and my home server, and not between the client and the internet-facing VPS, such that the information remains encrypted and unreadable to the VPS. The two strategies that I have seen can do this is SNI routing with nginx or to use stunnel. I still have not been able to set up either!
In that case, you're better off just using the VPS machine as port forwarding port 443 to your home machine's wireguard IP address and handle the SSL/TLS termination on the home machine.
This way all HTTPS traffic will be passing trough the VPS and being decrypted on your home machine, and encrypted data will be sent from your home machine back to the client. Anyone gets in or sniffs traffic will see encrypted traffic. Plus it's already sent over encrypted VPN network. To really see what's happening, they need to get into the machine and technically could use the wireguard private keys to decrypt the traffic, but they will still see the encrypted HTTPS traffic. So you're good, technically.
In that case, you’re better off just using the VPS machine as port forwarding port 443 to your home machine’s wireguard IP address and handle the SSL/TLS termination on the home machine.
This is what I would like to do! I was trying to handle the SSL termination 'automatically' by simply forwarding the connections to 443 of my machine's wireguard IP using nginx, but I did not manage to get it to work. That's when I found that I need to use something like 'stunnel' to handle the SSL termination. But I think that you may be suggesting an even simpler method of using port-forwarding instead of the reverse proxy. I am not sure how to achieve that, I will look into it using these terms.
You did kinda push me in that direction to try the same thing. Once I have bit more time, I'll try it out and send an example. Unless you beat me to it 😂
After lots of testing I found a configuration that works for me! In the end it is very simple, but I am quite a newbie at this so it took some effort to figure out what works. ChatGPT helped a bit too - and also confused me a lot - but it helped.
What I do now is:
I set up a wireguard tunnel. The VPS in this example has the 'wireguard' ip of 10.222.0.1, and my home network is 10.222.0.2. These are my configs (/etc/wireguard/wg0.conf):
VPS wireguard config:
spoiler
[Interface]
Address = 10.222.0.1/24
ListenPort = 51820
PrivateKey = <VPS Private key>
[Peer]
PublicKey = <Home network public key>
AllowedIPs = 10.222.0.2/32
PersistentKeepalive = 25
Home network (Respberry pi) config :
spoiler
[Interface]
Address = 10.222.0.2/32
PrivateKey = <Home network private key>
[Peer]
PublicKey = <VPS Public Key>
Endpoint = <VPS_IP>:51820
AllowedIPs = 10.222.0.0/16
PersistentKeepalive = 25
Then, I use the following iptables commands in the VPS to map requests to port 80 and 443 to the ports 80 and 443 of the tunnel. What really confused me for a while was that I did not know that I needed to include the "POSTROUTING" step so that the packets get sent back the correct way, and that I had to set net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf:
IP tables in VPS:
spoiler
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 443 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.222.0.2:443
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp -d 10.222.0.2 --dport 443 -j SNAT --to-source 10.222.0.1
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.222.0.2:80
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp -d 10.222.0.2 --dport 80 -j SNAT --to-source 10.222.0.1
Then, in my home network I use the standard nginx config:
spoiler
server {
server_name website.com;
listen 80;
location / {
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}
}
server {
server_name website.com;
listen 443;
location / {
proxy_set_header Host $host;
proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:<Website Port>;
}
# certificate management here
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/website.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/website.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot
}
This configuration seems to work, and since both ports 80 and 433 are mapped you can use certbot to generate and renew the SSL certificates automatically.
I am still learning, and this is the first thing that worked - so there might be a better way! But a lot of things I tried would not complete the SSL handshake correctly. > push m
A wireguard tunnel/VPN is probably what you want.
Thank you! I will look into this
From what I have learned today, I think that Wireguard Tunnel is what I want!
First I was able to use nginx as a reverse proxy to route the information from my home network through the VPS. But with this approach the client would do the SSL handshake with the VPS, and then the VPS fetches information from my home network via HTTP. Since there is no encryption layer between my VPS and my home network, I suppose that the flow of information between my home server and the VPS is insecure.
Then, I need to establish some form of encrypted connection between my home server and the VPS... And that is where the Wireguard Tunnel comes in! This tunnel allows me to transfer the information with encryption.
I am still reading and setting it up, but yeah, I'm liking this, thanks!
Nginx can also do something called SNI routing that would allow to keep the connection between your VPS and your homeserver encrypted, but overall I think a Wireguard tunnel is probably more flexible.
Oh, cool! I have managed to do it with the Wireguard tunnel! I set up a tunnel and use the nginx proxy_pass to redirect through the tunnel. It is pretty nifty that I don't even need to port-forward!
My next step is: in my current configuration, the SSL handshake occurs between the VPS and connecting client. So the VPS has access to everything that goes through... I need to figure out how to hand-shake through the tunnel such that the VPS does not get the SSL keys.
Thanks a lot for your suggestion!
You can do SNI routing also though the tunnel.
That's the next topic then. Thank you
I currently use reverse ssh tunnels to my vps. The vps runs nginx proxy manager and through that way I can tunnel specific ports to my vps, whereas with wireguard all my internet traffic was rerouted to my vps. I didn't like that because of bandwith limitations so that's why I chose this aproach
ssh tunnels
There are so many concepts to learn about! But if the SSH tunnel improves the the available useful bandwidth compared nginx/wireguard, it might be worth looking into it too. Thanks!
nah it's more that I really don't understand wireguard an that I'm to incompetent to learn to correctly configure it so that it only tunnels a few ports, if you're looking to use ssh tunnels I'd recommend this tutorial from jeff geerling: https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2022/ssh-and-http-raspberry-pi-behind-cg-nat
These two questions are really quite different and the answers to each are completely different.
Or... to say the same thing another way, do these "multiple websites" need to be accessible by the public?
If not, then use wireguard. This way your home network only needs to expose a single port listening for wireguard connections. Not much of an attack surface area.
If so, then use a reverse proxy. This way you expose a single port 443 listening for https connections, and nginx (or whatever) routes requests to the correct internal port depending on the domain used in the request. Again, not much of an attack surface area.
No bots are going to assess your multiple websites and conclude that it's your home network, because it will just look like any other web server on the net. Additionally even if they did conclude that it's your home network an nginx server listening to https requests is the same surface area you would have if you were forwarding all the traffic via your VPS.
IMO, in all cases the VPS is just added complexity for no benefit.
You could do the VPN / VPS option with a reverse proxy like nginx proxy manager. Or, you could use Cloudflare tunnels. Worth noting that from a privacy perspective you’d be putting a lot of trust in Cloudflare. The same is also true for whoever you pick as your VPS provider
Thanks! Wireguard was suggested as a VPN, and I am currently playing with that.