Does anyone have a guide to Traefik for an absolute idiot (myself)?
I was able to get a freshrss server running using dockercompose and was able to connect to it on my local network, but all the guides I read said I NEED to have a reverse proxy before I access it remotely.
This is probably my sign I need to actually learn how to use docker instead of being lazy as hell and copy/pasting code, but I thought I’d ask.
As stated before you don’t need a reverse proxy. Since you are exposing port 8080 ( if you stuck the config on the docker hub page; “-p 8080:80”) it is reachable from everywhere, where you have access to that machine.
A reverse proxy can expose many different services running either on the same machine or from a remote. As long as the reverse proxy is in the same docker network (usually “default”) it can access your services without their ports exposed.
You can configure the reverse proxy to decide which backend service to call by path, dns name or other patterns.
A reverse proxy can also do TLS termination and get certificates from let’s encrypt, so the backend services don’t have to deal with it.
So if you run more than one service on the same machine and want to use TLS you normally want to use a reverse proxy.
I personally use traefik because I used to but I also used nginx and caddy. Whatever works for you. But I agree that caddy is easier to get going without a lot of boilerplate config.
@fraydabson@krdo been curious about caddy before but I have no reason to switch from nginx-proxy-manager. Has anyone got any experience with both of these ? How do they compare?
Im new with reverse proxies. My understanding is that npm is way easier to do stuff with the UI and you use it to setup the certs and all that.
With caddy it has auto https. So you just need one Caddyfile listing your reverse proxies and that’s it. It just works. No config or anything.
Now if you want to do more advanced stuff like what you would do with nginx conf files, caddy is very expansive with its directives. Setting up redirects or error pages and what not. It’s super simple in the Caddyfile. I’m still learning how to do more complex stuff like if else statements and what not.
@fraydabson Thanks for the explainer. I was recently tempted to try it out but my certs end everything is managed by NPM and didn't really have the time to redo my whole setup but it looms interesting
Also consider there’s a plugin designed to change its config dynamically through docker labels sort of like Traefik, although I can’t say I’ve used it myself.
No, you don’t need a reverse proxy. If you’re accessing anything remotely, I highly recommend just setting up a VPN instead of exposing a bunch of different services to the Internet.
In my setup I still use reverse proxy even though all of my services are inside a VPN. IMO it is just more convenient to have services accesible as subdomains or subdirectory than as different ports.
+1 for this, add Tailscale DNS or similar on top plus a local redirect and you have easy access to it all through the same unified FQDN no matter if local, remote through an exposed Caddy, or remote through your VPN.
Do you have some guides to share regarding local redirect ? I have some troubles accessing my services from my phone when I am at home and it forces me to turn on the VPN, I couldn’t fine a solution so far…
I don’t have a guide at hand but I basically just set a wildcard DNS rewrite on AdGuard Home so that *.my.domain redirects to the IP running my reverse proxy. Since AdGuard is set up at the router level, everything goes through it so the proxy handles everything from there.
I can share specifics after I get home in a few hours if you need a hand, feel free to reach out.
Oh, I see. I have Pihole setup as a local DNS, but this works only partially, because my ISP router sucks and I have no control over it… basically, it works perfectly for wired connections, buy devices connected via WiFi will more often than not bypass Pihole and get a DNS server directly from the router (via IPv6).
Right, that’s a bummer. I’m guessing you don’t have enough access to turn off your router’s DHCP server so pihole can take over properly? If that’s the case, I guess you’d have to get another router and make your own subnet off the ISP one or something along those lines so you have more control, that’s kinda what my setup looks like at the moment.
Gotta love ISPs. I ended up getting myself a good router on my own and having it piggyback off the ISP provided one so I could actually change settings around. Not ideal but it’s something. As a bonus, my subnet always looks the same and whatnot, a godsend for self-hosting.
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