I’m sure I’m massively overthinking this, but any help would be greatly appreciated.
I have a domain name that I bought through NameCheap and I’ve pointed it to Cloudflare (i.e. updated the name servers). I have a Synology NAS on which I run Docker and a few containers. Up until now I’ve done this using IP addresses and ports to access everything (I have a Homepage container running and just link to everything from there).
But I want to setup SSL and start running Vaultwarden, hence purchasing a domain name to make it all easier.
I tried creating an A record in Cloudflare to point to the internal IP of my NAS (and obviously, this couldn’t be orange-clouded through CF because it’s internal to my LAN). I’m very reluctant to point the A record to the external IP of my NAS (which, for added headache is dynamic, so I’d need to get some kind of DDNS) because I don’t want to expose everything on my NAS to the Internet. In actual fact, I’m not precious about accessing any of this stuff over the internet - if I need remote access I have a Tailscale container running that I can connect to (more on that later in the post). The domain name was purely for ease of setting up SSL and Vaultwarden.
So I guess my questions are:
- What is the best way to go about this - do I create a DDNS on the NAS and point that external IP address to my domain in Cloudflare, then use Traefik to just expose the containers I want to have access to using subdomains?
- If so, then how do I know that all other ports aren’t accessible (I assume because I’m only going to expose ports 80 and 443 in Traefik?)
- What do other people see (i.e. outside my network) if they go to my domain? How do I ensure they can’t access my NAS and see some kind of page?
- Is there a benefit to using Cloudflare?
- How would Pi-hole and local DNS fit into this? I guess I could point my router at Pi-hole for DNS and create my A records on Pi-hole for all my subdomains - but what do I need to setup initially in Cloudflare?
- I also have a RPi that has a (very basic) website on it - how do I setup an A record to have Cloudflare point a sub-domain to the Pi’s IP address?
- Going back to the Tailscale thing - is it possible to point the domain to the IP address of the Tailscale container, so that the domain is only accessible when I switch on the Tailscale VPN? Is this a good idea/bad idea? Is there a better way to do it?
I’m sure these are all noob-type questions, but for the past 6-7 years I’ve purely used this internally using IP:port combinations, so never had to worry about domain names and external exposure, etc.
Many thanks in advance!
That’s not quite how it works - the port forwarding is on your internet gateway to allow traffic on those ports to a specific host internal to your network. That’s your only option if you want these services to be available on the wider web.
My recommendation around using 80 to redirect to 443 is because in 2023 there’s no reason for that traffic to be unencrypted - just listen on 80 and say “Hey, go to https://example.com” instead.
If you don’t care about that you can do internal only DNS + VPN into the network and still get the benefits of free SSL certificates via the LetsEncrypt DNS01 challenge.
Thanks, and yeah sorry, what I meant was to listen on both ports 80 and 443 and have a redirect in Traefik from 80 to 443 - I don’t plan on having anything directly accessible over port 80.
As per another post, I’ve hit a stumbling block:
OK so made a start with this. Spun up a Pi-hole container, added mydomain.com as an A record in Local DNS, and created a CNAME for traefik.mydomain.com to point to mydomain.com.
In Cloudflare, I removed the mydomain.com A record and the www CNAME record.
Doing an nslookup on mydomain.com I get
Non-authoritative answer: *** Can't find mydomain.com: No answerWhich I guess is to be expected.
However, when I then navigate to http://traefik.mydomain.com in my browser, I’m met with a Cloudflare error page: https://imgur.com/XhKOywo.
Below is the docker-compose of my traefik container:
traefik: container_name: traefik image: traefik:latest restart: unless-stopped networks: - medianet ports: - 80:80 volumes: - /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime:ro - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro - /volume1/docker/traefik:/etc/traefik - /volume1/docker/traefik/access.log:/logs/access.log - /volume1/docker/traefik/traefik.log:/logs/traefik.log - /volume1/docker/traefik/acme/acme.json:/acme.json environment: - TZ=Europe/London labels: - traefik.enable=true - traefik.http.routers.traefik.rule=Host(`$TRAEFIK_DASHBOARD_HOST`) && (PathPrefix(`/api`) || PathPrefix(`/dashboard`)) - traefik.http.routers.traefik.service=api@internalMy traefik.yml is also nice and basic at this point:
global: sendAnonymousUsage: false entryPoints: web: address: ":80" api: dashboard: true insecure: true providers: docker: endpoint: "unix:///var/run/docker.sock" watch: true exposedByDefault: false log: filePath: traefik.log level: DEBUG accessLog: filePath: access.log bufferingSize: 100Any ideas what’s going wrong? I’m unclear on why the domain is still routing to Cloudflare.
Sorry about the delay.
Probably TTL to be honest, it can take a long time for DNS changes to propagate. You’d typically set the TTL really low, wait a while, then change the value, then set the TTL back.
No problem, I appreciate the help!
So I’ve made a fair bit of progress now - I’ve managed to get all my containers working behind the Traefik reverse proxy with SSL. I’ve also deployed a Cloudflare DDNS container in Docker and have linked the external IP address of my Synology NAS to Cloudflare. I haven’t port forwarded 80 and 443, though, so it’s not accessible over the internet. So I’ve added local DNS into Pi-hole so I can access all the containers using subdomains.
I’ve also deployed an Authelia container and have started running through my containers adding 2FA in front of them all.
I should probably point out at this juncture, that if I encounter any errors, the HTTP 404 page that I get is a Cloudflare one - I assume that’s expected behaviour?
So, the final three bits I’m struggling with now are:
Portainer - I have no idea how I do it, because I use it to manage my containers, so don’t have the config for Portainer in Portainer (obviously). So if I screw up the config, how am I getting back in to Portainer to fix it?
And the far more troubling one is Pi-hole. I just cannot get that thing working behind the reverse proxy.
I’ve followed a few different guides (though none of them are recent), and the below is the latest docker-compose I have. It will bring up the login page, but when I login it keeps returning me back to the login page - it won’t go to the main admin page.
version: "3.7" services: pihole: container_name: pihole image: pihole/pihole:latest restart: unless-stopped networks: - medianet - npm_network ports: - 8008:80 - 53:53/tcp - 53:53/udp environment: - TZ=Europe/London - WEBPASSWORD=xxxxxxxxxx - FTLCONF_LOCAL_IPV4=192.168.1.116 - WEBTHEME=default-auto - DNSMASQ_LISTENING=ALL - VIRTUAL_HOST=pihole.mydomain.com volumes: - /path/to/pihole:/etc/pihole - /path/to/pihole/dnsmasq.d:/etc/dnsmasq.d cap_add: - NET_ADMIN labels: - traefik.enable=true - traefik.http.routers.pihole.entrypoints=http - traefik.http.routers.pihole.rule=Host(`pihole.mydomain.com`) - traefik.http.middlewares.pihole-https-redirect.redirectscheme.scheme=https - traefik.http.routers.pihole.middlewares=pihole-https-redirect - traefik.http.middlewares.pihole-addprefix.addprefix.prefix=/admin - traefik.http.routers.pihole.middlewares=pihole-addprefix - traefik.http.routers.pihole-secure.entrypoints=https - traefik.http.routers.pihole-secure.rule=Host(`pihole.mydomain.com`) - traefik.http.routers.pihole-secure.tls=true - traefik.http.routers.pihole-secure.service=pihole - traefik.http.services.pihole.loadbalancer.server.port=80 networks: medianet: external: true npm_network: external: true