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?

  • ellwoodb English
    3•1 year ago

    Hey there,

    I have somewhat of a similar setup. I use Nginx Proxy Manager and AdGuard Homes rewrites to do the same thing as you.

    As for Question 1: Creating self-signed certs is pretty straightforward. I followed this tutorial by Christian Lempa: https://youtu.be/VH4gXcvkmOY He also has a good writeup on his GitHub: https://github.com/ChristianLempa/cheat-sheets/blob/main/misc/ssl-certs.md How to import the certs into Nginx, I don’t know, but I think that’s easy to lookup online.

    Regarding Question 2: My understanding is that all traffic goes through the Reverse Proxy.

    I hope I could help, let me know if you have any more questions.

    • @rootOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Thank you for the reply! I’ll check out those resource now :)

    • @rootOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      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

        • @rootOPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          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.

      • @untilyouarrivedEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        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.

        • @rootOPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          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.

          • @untilyouarrivedEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            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.

            • @rootOPEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              Would you need to leave Nginx “online” after setting up the certs? I have mine so that it can’t reach out at all.

  • 0x0F
    1•1 year ago

    1: not very hard actually, the hardest part is gettin the cert onto your other devices x3
    all you need to do is add each subdomain to the cert, add ssl_certificate and ssl_certificate_key to the http block, then enable ssl for each subdomain, like so:

    http {
    # cert
    ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/public.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/private.key;
    server {
        listen       12345:443 ssl;
        server_name  pi.hole;

        location / {
                proxy_pass http://localhost:80;
        }
    }
    server {
        listen       12345:443 ssl;
        server_name  fox.hole;

        location / {
                proxy_pass http://localhost:621;
        }
    }
}

    2: correct, all traffic goes through nginx.