Reverse Proxies with Nginx Proxy Manager :: Guru Computing Blog

Table of Contents

Introduction

A time comes in a homelabber’s journey where it isn’t enough to simply publish ports, or map ports from docker. There are many limitations to simply having a bunch of web services on different ports:

Browsers expect HTTP to be served on port 80 and HTTPS on port 443. That limits you to a single “correctly” mapped service per IP.
Speaking of HTTPS, most services get published on unencrypted HTTP, or HTTPS with self-signed certs. Browsers dislike http and really dislike https on untrusted certs.
No descriptive names. What service are you running on what port?

These are all problems that a reverse proxy can solve.

What Reverse Proxy should we use?

Wait, haven’t we already talked about reverse proxies? Yep, in fact I have a published reverse proxy guide for caddy already! Choice is a wonderful thing however, and we can improve our choice with Nginx Proxy Manager. This doesn’t make Nginx Proxy Manager the right choice, or caddy the wrong one: they are just different tools to accomplish the same thing.

TL;DR

This guide will:

Install the Nginx Proxy Manager web server into a docker container
set nginx proxy manager to proxy a docker service
show the following capabilities with nginx proxy manager:
- IP Whitelisting
- Proxying self signed TLS services
- Serving with Self Signed TLS
Using ACME based providers for signed SSL certificates

Requirements

Like most of my guides, this guide will be docker oriented. You will need:

A docker server (this guide will be running a minimal fedora installation with docker)
If following the let’s encrypt components, a valid registered domain with a registrar like cloudflare.

Moving on

Let’s move on with installing nginx proxy manager