this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
56 points (98.3% liked)

Selfhosted

52632 readers
2861 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 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm going round in circles on this one.

What I want to do is:

  • serve up my self-hosted apps with https (to local clients only - nothing over the open web)
  • address them as 'app.server.lan' or 'sever.lan/app'
  • preferably host whatever is needed in docker

I think this is achievable with a reverse proxy, some kind of DNS server and self-signed certs. I'm not a complete noob but my knowledge in this area is lacking. I've done a fair bit of research but I'm probably not using the right terminology or whatever.

Would anyone have a link to a good guide that covers this?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] elvith@feddit.org 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

I have this setup. I bought a domain (say homeserver.tld) from a registrar that allows zone edits with an API. Then I use certbot with a plugin that supports my registrar to get real Let's Encrypt certificates. Usually Let's encrypt connects to your server to ensure that it responds to the domain you're requesting a certificate for, but this challenge can also be done by editing the DNS record of your domain to prove ownership. That is called DNS-01 challenge and is useful of your domain is not publicly reachable. Google for certbot DNS-01 your registrar to find some documentation.

Some of the VMs/LXC now get certificates for a specific subdomain ("some-app.homeserver.tld"), other just get a wildcard certificate ("*.homeserver.tld") - e.g. my docker host.