this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
109 points (97.4% liked)

Selfhosted

40246 readers
1066 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 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

So, I have some idea on what a reverse proxy does and will be using nginx (with the neat proxy manager UI) for my setup.

However, I'm not completely clear what exactly I want it to do and how I cn use it to run different services on one machine. I'm especially unclear on the ports configuration .... tutorials will say things like "change the listening port to xxx for that service and to port yyy for the other service"

How does this work, which ports can I use and how do I need to configure the respective services?

EDIT: thanks everybody, your replies did help me a lot! I have my basic setup now up and running using portainer + nginx + fail2ban.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] marsokod@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'll provide an ELI5, though if you actually want to use it you'll have to go beyond ELI5.

You contact a web service via a combination of IP address and port. For the sake of simplicity, we can assume that domain name is equivalent to IP address. You can then compare domain name/port with street name/street number: you need both to actually find someone. By default, some street numbers are really standard, like 443 is for regular encrypted connection. But you can have any service on any street number, it's just less nice and less standard. This is usually done on closed networks.

Now what happens if you have a lot of services and you want all of them reachable at address 443? Well basically you are now in the same situation as a business building with a lobby. Whenever you want to contact a service, you go to 443, ask the reception what floor they are in, and they will direct you there. The reception desk is your proxy: just making sure you talk to the right people.