Currently, I use dockerproxy + swag and Cloudflare for externally-facing services. I really like that I don’t have to open any ports on my router for this to work, and I don’t need to create any routes for new services. When a new service is started, I simply include a label to call swag and the subdomain & TLS cert are registered with Cloudflare. About the only complaint I have is Cloudflare’s 100MG upload limit, but I can easily work around that, and it’s not a limit I see myself hitting too often.
What’s not clear to me is what I’m missing by not using Traefik or Caddy. Currently, the only thing I don’t have in my setup is central authentication. I’m leaning towards Authentik for that, and I might look at putting it on a VPS, but that’s the only thing I have planned. Other than that, almost everything’s running on a single Beelink S12. If I had to, I could probably stand up a failover pretty quickly, though.
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I switched from SWAG to Caddy. Its config file is much simpler, with many best practice settings being default resulting in each sites being like 3 lines of code. Implementing something like mTLS requires one line per site, just super nice to configure, and you’re not left without a template config for more obscure services.
That being said, SWAG does more than enough and Nginx is a powerful software so you really aren’t missing out on anything but more streamlined config.
Traefik is kind of just like, a nightmare that tries to sell you on it being “self configuring” but it takes some work to get to that point and the “self configuring” requires the same amount of time in a text editor as manually configuring Caddy does. I can see Traefik being powerful if you’re using it with actually clustered k8s and distributed workloads. If that’s not your use case it’s kinda just more work than it’s worth.
Except that everything is under your control and not managed by a third party, not much I think.
If this setup works for you and you’re happy with it, just keep it going.
If you have time to spare, want to learn new things, tinkerer arround with network security, certificates, DNS, reverse proxy and, and, and… You can give it a try in a virtual machine and docker containers. But keep in mind that’s not an easy way and involves a lot of personal time before you get a GOOD working self-hosted / exposed services.
I wouldn’t recommend to open any port on your router except for a secured tunnel like wireguard and connect to your services through that tunnel. Opening port 443/80 on your router is bound to some heavy automated scanning and brute force by bots. If you don’t have the necessary knowledge/tool/hardware, this is just going to put you at risk of ddos and remote attacks.
That’s way something like cloudflare is populare, they most of the time take care of that nuisance and also why something like wireguard is popular among the selfhosting community.
I’ve recently introduced CrowdSec and crowdsec-bouncer-traefik-plugin into my setup and it’s really great to see it block all those spam bots and brute force attempts.
Thanks for the tip !! I will certainly give it a look, It’s kinda annoying for my family members to always connect via wireguard.
For me it’s fine though, I even route my traffic to ProtonVPN but my family is always nagging how they need to “do something” to get access to the hosted services or that it “doesn’t work”.
Which crowdsec lists did you use? I’m on the free plan and can only subscribe to three of them and most of everything on the free tier looks like is useless since my Suricata can sync its rules with Proofpoint ET Open rulesets which are significantly more robust
I’ve only subscribed to the “Free proxies” blocklist. But these are only additional blocklists. The main attraction of CrowdSec is their “CAPI” (Central API) which has all the current malicious actors detected in the network of CrowdSec instances and is used automatically.