Hi all. Noob question/s here. I want to be able to access my Immich server (docker) externally and maybe set up some others (e.g. Mealio). My understanding is that I need (should) use NGINX reverse proxy for this. My questions are:
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Do I need to set up NGINX on a VPS (or similar cloud based server) to send the queries to my home box?
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Do I need to purchase a domain (randomblahblah.xyz) to use as the main access route from outside my house?
Thanks a lot.
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I’m still relatively new to NGINX Proxy Manager myself, but I’ll give your questions a shot. It doesn’t matter how (or where) you host your proxy instance, what matters is that the requests can get to it so that it can forward them to the correct resources. So simple answer to question one is no you can host locally.
If you host it locally you need to make sure that you forward requests that come into your network on to the proxy to be routed correctly. This is where port forwarding comes into play. You’ll need to set your router to take any requests that come in on port 80 or 443 (HTTP and HTTPS) and send those to your proxy.
As for question two do you need to purchase a domain. You can use a free domain name or you can pay for one that part doesn’t matter. The domain isn’t a technical requirement until you want to start hardening your instances with SSL. To get a cert you’ll need a domain. But if you set up your port forwarding and a proxy you could send a request to some_subdomain.123.456.789.123:80 (your external IP) and the proxy server will take thar request and translate it to the local server mapped to some_subdomain.
Thanks, I’m going to try the port forwarding part. That seems like the simplest step. NPM looks very useful though.