I have a nextcloud instance being hosted from my home network. The URL associated with it points directly at my home’s IP. I don’t want to host the instance on a VPS because disk space is expensive. So, instead, I want to point the URL at the VPS, and then somehow route the connection to my home’s nextcloud instance without leaking my home’s ip.
How might I go about doing this? Can this be achieved with nginx?
EDIT: Actually, not leaking my home’s IP is not essential. It is acceptable if it is possible to determine the IP with some effort. What I really want is to be able to host multiple websites with my single home IP without those websites being obviously connected, and to avoid automatic bots constantly looking for vulnerabilities in my home network.
I have done this before by setting up a Wireguard VPN link between my home server and a VPS, and then running a reverse proxy (such as Caddy) on the VPS, which basically forwarded web requests to my home server. This works well for most things, although there was a definite performance hit by routing traffic through the extra hop.
By using the VPN connection, you wouldn’t even need to open a port on your home network which is a great starting point for security as well.
You can setup HTTP reverse proxy on your VPS. You’ll need to point the domain to your VPS for that to work.
What I really want is to be able to host multiple websites with my single home IP without those websites being obviously connected
That’s easy. You have two ways:
- Host the websites under different paths in the same domain. If your websites are static this is fine, but if they are “services” this may not be feasible (and could be very complicated if it is feasible).
- Host them under different sub-domains. The way it works is you create a bunch of NS records in your DNS, pointing the subdomains to your root domain, and setup one “virtual host” for each of them in your HTTP server. Both Apache and Nginx have the ability to match virtual host by domain name.
to avoid automatic bots constantly looking for vulnerabilities in my home network.
I’m not sure how you would eliminate bots by separating the websites though.
Reverse proxy with caddy?
A wireguard tunnel/VPN is probably what you want.
From what I have learned today, I think that Wireguard Tunnel is what I want!
First I was able to use nginx as a reverse proxy to route the information from my home network through the VPS. But with this approach the client would do the SSL handshake with the VPS, and then the VPS fetches information from my home network via HTTP. Since there is no encryption layer between my VPS and my home network, I suppose that the flow of information between my home server and the VPS is insecure.
Then, I need to establish some form of encrypted connection between my home server and the VPS… And that is where the Wireguard Tunnel comes in! This tunnel allows me to transfer the information with encryption.
I am still reading and setting it up, but yeah, I’m liking this, thanks!
Nginx can also do something called SNI routing that would allow to keep the connection between your VPS and your homeserver encrypted, but overall I think a Wireguard tunnel is probably more flexible.
Oh, cool! I have managed to do it with the Wireguard tunnel! I set up a tunnel and use the nginx proxy_pass to redirect through the tunnel. It is pretty nifty that I don’t even need to port-forward!
My next step is: in my current configuration, the SSL handshake occurs between the VPS and connecting client. So the VPS has access to everything that goes through… I need to figure out how to hand-shake through the tunnel such that the VPS does not get the SSL keys.
Thanks a lot for your suggestion!
You can do SNI routing also though the tunnel.
That’s the next topic then. Thank you
You can set up nginx to do reverse proxy to your home IP, and then limit the traffic on your home IP to the VPS IP.
You can also setup a wireguard VPN between VPS and your home machine, so the traffic between VPS and your hoke machine is encrypted.
For DNS you just point to the VPS, and manage connections there, and on home network allow only VPS IP to connect. Then manage your security on the VPS.
Thanks a lot! This is kind of the configuration that I have converged to, with nginx and WireGuard. The last thing I need to set up correctly is for the SSL handshake to occur between the client and my home server, and not between the client and the internet-facing VPS, such that the information remains encrypted and unreadable to the VPS. The two strategies that I have seen can do this is SNI routing with nginx or to use stunnel. I still have not been able to set up either!
In that case, you’re better off just using the VPS machine as port forwarding port 443 to your home machine’s wireguard IP address and handle the SSL/TLS termination on the home machine.
This way all HTTPS traffic will be passing trough the VPS and being decrypted on your home machine, and encrypted data will be sent from your home machine back to the client. Anyone gets in or sniffs traffic will see encrypted traffic. Plus it’s already sent over encrypted VPN network. To really see what’s happening, they need to get into the machine and technically could use the wireguard private keys to decrypt the traffic, but they will still see the encrypted HTTPS traffic. So you’re good, technically.
In that case, you’re better off just using the VPS machine as port forwarding port 443 to your home machine’s wireguard IP address and handle the SSL/TLS termination on the home machine.
This is what I would like to do! I was trying to handle the SSL termination ‘automatically’ by simply forwarding the connections to 443 of my machine’s wireguard IP using nginx, but I did not manage to get it to work. That’s when I found that I need to use something like ‘stunnel’ to handle the SSL termination. But I think that you may be suggesting an even simpler method of using port-forwarding instead of the reverse proxy. I am not sure how to achieve that, I will look into it using these terms.
You did kinda push me in that direction to try the same thing. Once I have bit more time, I’ll try it out and send an example. Unless you beat me to it 😂
After lots of testing I found a configuration that works for me! In the end it is very simple, but I am quite a newbie at this so it took some effort to figure out what works. ChatGPT helped a bit too - and also confused me a lot - but it helped.
What I do now is:
I set up a wireguard tunnel. The VPS in this example has the ‘wireguard’ ip of 10.222.0.1, and my home network is 10.222.0.2. These are my configs (/etc/wireguard/wg0.conf):
VPS wireguard config:
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[Interface] Address = 10.222.0.1/24 ListenPort = 51820 PrivateKey = <VPS Private key> [Peer] PublicKey = <Home network public key> AllowedIPs = 10.222.0.2/32 PersistentKeepalive = 25Home network (Respberry pi) config :
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[Interface] Address = 10.222.0.2/32 PrivateKey = <Home network private key> [Peer] PublicKey = <VPS Public Key> Endpoint = <VPS_IP>:51820 AllowedIPs = 10.222.0.0/16 PersistentKeepalive = 25Then, I use the following iptables commands in the VPS to map requests to port 80 and 443 to the ports 80 and 443 of the tunnel. What really confused me for a while was that I did not know that I needed to include the “POSTROUTING” step so that the packets get sent back the correct way, and that I had to set net.ipv4.ip_forward=1 in /etc/sysctl.conf:
IP tables in VPS:
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iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 443 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.222.0.2:443 iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp -d 10.222.0.2 --dport 443 -j SNAT --to-source 10.222.0.1 iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j DNAT --to-destination 10.222.0.2:80 iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -p tcp -d 10.222.0.2 --dport 80 -j SNAT --to-source 10.222.0.1Then, in my home network I use the standard nginx config:
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server { server_name website.com; listen 80; location / { return 301 https://$host$request_uri; } } server { server_name website.com; listen 443; location / { proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_pass http://0.0.0.0:<Website Port>; } # certificate management here ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/website.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/website.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot }This configuration seems to work, and since both ports 80 and 433 are mapped you can use certbot to generate and renew the SSL certificates automatically.
I am still learning, and this is the first thing that worked - so there might be a better way! But a lot of things I tried would not complete the SSL handshake correctly. > push m
If all you’re wanting to do is hide your home ip, could you just put it behind cloudflare?
You could do the VPN / VPS option with a reverse proxy like nginx proxy manager. Or, you could use Cloudflare tunnels. Worth noting that from a privacy perspective you’d be putting a lot of trust in Cloudflare. The same is also true for whoever you pick as your VPS provider
Thanks! Wireguard was suggested as a VPN, and I am currently playing with that.
