posted in Selfhosted

petrichornetrainfall@petrichornetrainfall@piefed.social

Good resources for setting up a domain name to a local Caddy instance

I’ve been using Linux for decades, I’ve worked as a software engineer/architect/sre for around a decade, but networking has always been my biggest gap in knowledge.

I have a local server, I have caddy spun up, a glinet router running their version of openwrt, and I have a domain name purchased through porkbun.

I am looking to setup “local.domain.com” to point to my local server, ideally without exposing it publicly, and enable devices on my home network to be able to access it from that url. Id also like to be able to access containers running on that server by something like “searxng.local.domain.com” or “local.domain.com/searxng” aka without using the port suffix. Id also like to enable https.

I have read so many guides that have fragments of what I need, but nothing that ties enough together to get it working. And with all the options around different domain registers, let’s encrypt, reverse proxies, etc, im struggling just a bit.

Are their any guides (prefer text over YouTube, but beggars cant be choosers) that people recommend that encompass the whole process, instead of just pieces? Id like to understand it instead of just fumble through it.

un_ax@un_ax@lemmy.today

Replying to an earlier post

The other answers covered options on hooking up the internal DNS, so here is the https part for the sake of completeness.

One option is running an internal CA, but that’s for crazy people. And you have to distribute your root CA to every device using it, which can be annoying if you don’t have centralized configuration management in place.

If you want https with caddy and don’t want it exposed you can use a DNS challenge with your external DNS provider. Check the list here for your provider.

Assuming docker and your dns isn’t built in you build a custom docker image with the plugins you need. This is a Dockerfile for route53 based on here:

FROM caddy:builder AS builder

RUN xcaddy build \
    --with github.com/caddy-dns/route53

FROM caddy:alpine

COPY --from=builder /usr/bin/caddy /usr/bin/caddy

And then a docker-compose.yml in the same dir to use it:

services:
  caddy:
    build: .
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 80:80
      - 443:443
      - 443:443/udp
    volumes:
      - ./caddy_data:/data
      - ./caddy_config:/config
      - ./conf:/etc/caddy

With this mount setup you write conf/Caddyfile and include the DNS provider specific configuration relevant to your plugin, probably documented in its repo.

en