Getting a subdomain for free

A Haiku

VPS forwards \n Traffic through reverse proxy \n Towards homeserver

Ponder over what this haiku means. Truly, become IT. Only then may you move on to the next step.

What we need to accomplish

In the pu We first need to install NGINX, enable it, then configure it— in this case, NGINX will reverse proxy (aka serve as a proxy for an anonymous server, in our case a homeserver only accessible through wireguard).

server {
        listen 443 ssl;
        server_name www.your-domain.here your-domain.here;
        ssl_certificate /.ssh/id_rsa.pub;
        ssl_certificate_key /.ssh/id_rsa;
        location / {
                proxy_pass http://10.0.0.2:3456; # Replace with your backend application's address and port. No need to change if you followed my guide on VPN setup.
                proxy_set_header Host $host;
                proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
                proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
                proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
                }
        }

Ok, so we don’t have an ssl certificate yet. There’s a few places you can get those, but I won’t get into details here, as I just used the Cloudflare Web API to create them, then I SSH’d to my VPS and stored them there. Don’t share your ssl key with anyone. Consider restricting access to it:

chmod 600 /.ssh/id_rsa
chown nginx:nginx /.ssh/id_rsa

Wait, so it receives HTTPS traffic, then it forwards it over a different port altogether through the VPN. That’s actually cool. Now we need to set up serve our application in our homeserver with another reverse proxy:

TBD