I have self hosted immich on Debian on my homelab. I have also setup tailscale to be able to access it outside my home.
Sometime ago, I was able to purchase a domain of my choice from GoDaddy. While I am used to hosting stuff on Linux, I’ve never exposed it for access publicly. I want to do that now.
Is it something I can do within tailscale or do I need to setup something like cloudflare? What should I be searching for to learn and implement? What precautions to take? I would like to keep the tailscale thing too.
PS: I would like to host immich as a subdomain like photos.mydomain.com.
Thanks!
I have used reverse proxy in office setup where my local IP was NATed to a dedicated public IP. But in my home lab, I don’t have a dedicated public IP. So, i need to figure a way around that.
Just run a cron job updating your IP every 24 hours. All I’ve ever done for the last decade or so.
I should clarify, I use namecheap as my registrar and Afraid as my nameserver. Afraid has curl, cron and even just a url i think you can use to update your IP.
I know everyone loves to shit on Oracle, but a free-tier Oracle VPS would solve this.
Or if you want something decent pay for a cheap VPS.
We’re running home labs because we’ve learned that relying on “free” services eventually comes back to bite you.
Absolutely, if it was anything I needed or even really wanted to be sure was reliably available I’d never put it on a free VPS.
Now, something trivial like this that just requires installing wireguard and nginx, copying over some configs, and changing a DNS record? Hard to beat free.
I’ve set up several instances in circumstances like yours. The easiest way is to create a duckdns domain for yourself, and install their updater on one of your systems, to keep your external IP up to date with their DNS-Servers. Then you can use a DNS-Provider of your choice (I use Cloudflare) to create a “CNAME” DNS Record, that basically just tells a browser to redirect from your domain to the IP Address of the duckdns domain. That way you can have an automatically updating public IP behind your domain name. Then you “just” have to set up a reverse proxy (I use Nginx Proxy Manager, but there are newer and easier alternatives), and create the correct port forwarding rules in your router/firewall, and you should be good to go