Exposed my home server

For those who don’t know, I have a Raspberry Pi 5 at home. At first, I used it as a basic home server just for personal use, but recently I’ve started sharing it. The problem was that I couldn’t get port forwarding to work, but as a workaround I started using Cloudflared as it made things really simple.

Some time after that, while I was hosting my Forgejo Git server, I found that I couldn’t make a 100MB push due to a limitation on Cloudflared.

After some time digging, I discovered Tailscale, which somewhat worked.

The challenge: Make it public

The main reason for me to use Cloudflared was for me to be able to access my hosted services when I was away from home. This problem was solved with Tailscale, the problem is that there were some other services that I also wanted to expose for anybody on the internet, and that was just not possible by using Tailscale alone.

NGINX

Luckily, there are these things called Reverse Proxies that can reroute a request to another service very easily. I specifically use nginx in my projects, and for this I used it too.

Let’s say I have a url git.gerardgascon.com that points to a cheap VPS hosted on whatever place you want (I use a $4 Droplet on DigitalOcean). Inside that server there are two Docker containers running, one has Tailscale in it, and the other has nginx and exposes ports 80 and 443 (HTTP and HTTPS).

For each url I have, nginx takes it and routes it through the specific IP and port of my home server connected to my Tailnet.

Anyway, this is a really basic setup, but it just works fine. If you are curious, you can check the Docker and nginx configurations over here (A link proudly hosted on my home server).