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.
ELI5
So it’s saturday afternoon, a very hot one, so you ask your daddy for an ice cream (hosted service). The shop you go in is very bizarre though, as there is one vendor (TCP port) for each flavor (docker service/virtualhost). But it’s tricky because they’re all roaming in the shop, and you don’t know who’s responsible for each flavor. Your dad is also not very comfortable paying these vendors directly because they only accept cash and do not provide any receipt (self-signed certificate/no TLS).
Hopefully, there is the manager (reverseproxy) ! This girl is right where you expect her: behind the counter (port 80/443), accept credit cards and has a receipt machine (Domain name + associated certificate). She also knows everyone on her team, and who’s responsible for each flavor !
So you and your dad come to see the nice lady, ask for a strawberry + chocolate ice cream, and pay her directly. Once done, she forwards your request directly to the vendors responsible for each flavor, and give you back your ice cream + receipt. Life is good, and tasty !
That one is easy ! Because in a few years (remember, you’re 5), you’ll be a scout ! And to collect a few dollars for your summer camp, you’ll sell pastries to the neighborhood. It’s easier than ever because it’s 2030, and everyone can just order the pastries on your website, and pay online. All you have to do now is hop on your bike, and deliver the pastries (network connections) to your neighbors (online servers). So you grab the first package, and read the label on it:
- Mrs. Britneak
And that’s it ! You have no idea who this person is, or where they live ! So you call out your leader (DNS server):
- Hi Mr. Leader !
- … (nobody ever get my UDP jokes)
- So I got this package to deliver to mrs. Brtineak. But I don’t know where she lives
- Oh sure, let me lookup the register (zone file). Hold on for a sec… Alright, she’s here: 62.644888, -160.194309
And then he hangs up immediately (this is UDP, remember?).
You write it down (local caching DNS server), and look it up. You’re a scout, so you’re trained to read and find GPS coordinates. You go there in a few minutes and deliver the package in time ! Mrs Britneak is happy, and you go on to the next package:
- Mr. Tomburgh
Time to call leader again !
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.
A reverse proxy is a service that takes incoming traffic on an IP address and port. It reads the URL the connection came into and passes it to the service it is configured for.
Example: A server runs Plex. There is a DNS entry plex.myhome.nework that points to the IP of that server. Nginx listens on port 80 and 443. If a client connects to port 80 using plex.myhome.network nginx will pass it to Plex. If it comes in on 443 nginx will still pass it to Plex but it will also provide the configured SSL cert to the client connecting to Plex.
If the server is also running jellyfin and DNS is setup for jellyfin.myhome.network with the same IP. The user connects to jellyfin.myhome.network on port 80 Nginx instead passes it to jellyfin.
So from our example you can see that we have both jellyfin and Plex using the same IP address and port 80.
Since you already got a lot of ELI5s, here is a basic to-do to get you up and running. From my experience, since I use the exact same setup as you describe.
- Set up your containers in a way you can reach them from you local network (e.g. http://123.456.789.10:123)
- Get a domain name (you can get one at the registrar of your choice, e.g. mydomain.com)
- Set up NGINX proxy manager (NPM) (default address of webui would be http://123.456.789.10:81)
- Set up a new proxy host in NPM:
- Domain name: mycontainer.mydomain.com
- Scheme: http
- Forward Hostname/IP: 123.456.789.10 (if you get an error later on, you can use the docker container name if NPM and your container are connected to the same Docker network)
- Port: 123
- Via access lists you can provide a very basic username/pw login to protect your sites (you can do more and cooler stuff with Authelia)
- In the SSL tab you can (and should) setup the SSL encryption: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBGOJA27m_0
- Go to the DNS management of your registrar
- Add an A-record for mydomain.com and the public IP of your server (you can google public IP to find it out)
- Add a CNAME record for the subdomain with name mycontainer and target mydomain.com
- open port 443 of your server in your router If everything worked right, you can visit mycontainer.mydomain.com, your DNS server will resolve this to your public IP and forwards the request to nginx, which will serve the data of your local container
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=TBGOJA27m_0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
IPv4 version: Think of your public IP:Port as the office building, your internal IP:Port as the floor number, and reverse proxy as the reception on that floor.
(Your public IP:Port is routed to your internal IP:Port by the NAT on your router. The router knows which public port relates to which internal IP:Port due to the port forwarding rules you setup.)
IPv6 version: Think of your public IP:Port as the office, and the reverse proxy as the reception.
The following will be common to both IP protocols.
The port is usually 80 or 443, because reverse proxy is used for HTTP(S) connections, and by default those connections use the aforementioned ports.
When someone connects to your IP:Port, they ask the reverse proxy “hey, can you bring me to Mr. https://my-awesome-plex.xyz ?” and the reverse proxy will act as a middleman between that someone and the actual server that is serving that domain name.
The reverse proxy, as a middleman, forwards your requests to the server, and the server’s response is forwarded back to you by the reverse proxy too.
And just to make things complete… Why do we use reverse proxies?
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To hide the identity of the actual server. This is easy to understand - you are only ever talking to the proxy, never the actual server. It’s just that your messages are continually forwarded to the actual server.
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To save IP addresses. (One public address can serve multiple websites, if the actual servers are given only private IP addresses.)
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To load balance. The reverse proxy can direct one to another server if the first server is overloaded. This requires a website to be served by more than one server though, and selfhosters like us never really need it.
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To prevent attacks. If the reverse proxy realises that someone has been making too many connections to https://my-awesome-nas.com, the reverse proxy can reject subsequent connections. This is how Cloudflare works.
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Caching. If the middleman remembers that the server responded “what is the answer to everything” with “42”, then the next time someone asks the same question again, the middleman will simply reply with the same response. This takes off the workload on the server.
