Just exposed Immich via a remote and reverse proxy using Caddy and tailscale tunnel. I’m securing Immich using OAuth.
I don’t have very nerdy friends so not many people appreciate this.
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I’m a huge fan of Caddy and I wish more people would try it. The utter simplicity of the config file is breathtaking when you compare it with Apache or Nginx. Stuff that takes twenty or thirty lines in other webservers becomes just one in Caddy.
The only thing I don’t like about caddy is that using DNS challenge requires recompiling the program itself, and the plugins themselves can be a bit quirky. Mind you, you can easily handle this with a separate program like
legoorcertbotso not a huge deal.I love Caddy. So easy to configure, and the automatic SSL is almost always what I need.
I moved from swag to caddy and I’m glad i did. So much more simple.
Wrapping my head around reverse proxy was a game changer for me. I could finally host things that are usefull outside my LAN. I use Nginx-Proxy-Manager which makes the config simple for lazy’s like me.
Yeah port forwarding just isnt the same. I pretty heavily rely on Nextcloud and Plex doing the port forwarding for me
Plex can sometimes get by without port forwarding by using UPnP or NAT-PMP, but I had to open a port to use Plex (before I started using Jellyfin and a reverse proxy).
Same with Nextcloud, you either have to open a port or use a reverse proxy. Reverse proxy is more secure. Good stuff!
Worth mentioning that either way you’re opening up ports (you need to open 80 and 443 for the reverse proxy), but that’s much better than opening a bunch of ports, one for each thing you’re running.
The hardcore security minded people will always scream “use wireguard or whatever”, which also works really well (even combined with a reverse proxy that’s not exposed to the internet (80 and 443 not forwarded)). I do this for some of the stuff I run that I don’t want exposed at all, like my password manager. To access my password manager while out and about, I need to connect to my wireguard thing (my router sets it up for me), and then my phone is effectively back inside my LAN, and I can access whatever I need to. Fortunately it’s rare that I need to do this, because my password manager keeps a cached copy on my phone.
Sorry, getting long winded. You get the point!
Yeah both Nginx and plex handle making themselves public for me already. But I have a handful of other svcs that id like to move behind a reverse proxy too
NPM is awesome until you have a weird error that the web GUI does not give a hint about the problem. Used it for years at this point and wouldn’t consider anything else at this point. It just works and is super simple.
Those ones are fun. If you delete an SSL certificate and haven’t removed it from a proxy, the entire container goes down and you have to trawl through logs to find what went wrong.
Used to mess around with multiple Apache Proxy Servers. When I left that job I found Docker and (amongst other things) NPM and I swear, I stared at the screen in disbelief on how easy the setup and config was. All that time we wasted on Apache, the issues, the upgrades, the nightmare in setting it all up…
If I were to do that job again I would not hesitate to use NPM 100% and stop wasting my time with that Apache Proxy mess.
NPM
Nginx-Proxy-Manager. Got it.
I didn’t read the parent comment well enough and was wondering what the Node Package Manager had to do with anything 😂
+1 for NPM! Used to even do things manually, but I’m too lazy for that and NPM fulfils nearly all my use cases lol
came here to leave this exact response! 😁
Do you serve things to a public? Because unless you’re serving a public, that’s a dumb to do… and you really don’t understand the purpose of it.
If all you wanted was the ability to access services remotely, then you should have just created a WireGuard tunnel.
A lemmy instance, a wiki, and a couple of other website type things, yes.
Publicly facing things are pretty limited, but it’s still super handy inside the LAN with Adguard Home doing DNS rewrites to point it to the reverse proxy.
I appreciate what you’re saying, though. A lot of people get in trouble by having things like Radarr etc. open to the internet through their reverse proxy.
Am I making a mistake by having my Jellyfin server proxied through nginx? The other service I set up did need to be public so I just copied the same thing when I set up Jellyfin but is that a liability even with a password to access?
Not really. Personally I’d allow the service account running jellyfin only access to read media files to avoid accidental deletion but otherwise no.
Also, jellyfin docs have a sample proxy config. You should use that. It’s a bit more in depth than a normal proxy config.
This is very short sighted. I can think of dozens of things to put on the open internet that aren’t inherently public. The majority are things for sharing with multiple people you want to have logins for. As long as the exposed endpoints are secure, there’s no inherent problem.
And yet you’ve not provided one example, hmmmm
Seriously?
Plex, Jellyfin, VaultWarden, AdGuard, Home Assistant, GameVault, any flavor of pastebin, any flavor of wiki, and the list goes on.
If you’re feeling spicy throw whatever the hell you want onto a reverse proxy and put it behind a zero trust login.
The idea that opening up anything at all through to the open internet is “dumb” is antiquated. Are there likely concerns that need to be addressed? Absolutely. But don’t make blanket statements about virtually nothing belonging on the open internet.
None of those have to be public and can all be accessed with WireGuard. You just proved my point, moron
Why don’t we just throw Lemmy behind wireguard while we’re at it.
Literally anything can go behind a VPN. Doesn’t mean much at all. And the majority of those are commonly left on the open internet for friends and family, which would be annoying af to set up with WireGuard.
I have enough issues dealing with VPN issues in my professional life, I don’t want to have to deal with them in my personal life as well.
Tells me everything I need to know that you struggle with WireGuard… it’s dead simple. And can be completely automated so your household literally doesn’t need to do anything and their devices automatically connect to it.
Can someone ELI5? I’m a noob who aspires to set up immich in the near future. I only recently started making efforts to separate myself from the cloud. So far I’ve got a wireguard server set up and I’ve disconnected both my Bambu printers from the cloud and I’m currently setting up some home assistant stuff. Pretty soon I’m hoping to set up a NAS, Immich, Plex (or similar) and replace my google nest cameras.
Pretty much I have caddy on a VPS that’s pointing to my internal IP using a tailscale tunnel. You are still exposing the web gui to the Internet so I just changed authentication to OAuth to mitigate since risk. There is still a possibility of attacks via zero days, but my immich is on a VM and I’m creating firewall rules to just allow certain ports out.
I appreciate the extra details but I still don’t know what “caddy”, “VPS”, “tailscale tunnel”, or “zero days” are, but I can look it up.
It’s hard to explain from scratch.
Caddy is a reverse proxy software that essentially redirects traffic from a certain port to another port. For example external:port => internal:port. It also enables SSL encryption meaning everything will be encrypted en route between the external and the user.
VPS is a virtual private server. Just someone else’s computer you can expose to the Internet.
Tailscale is a mesh VPN that uses wire guard as its transport. I use this to tunnel between my VPS and my Immich server to hide my home IP and to allow encrypted traffic between my Immich server and my VPS.
A zero-day (also known as a 0-day) is a vulnerability in software or hardware that is typically unknown to the vendor and for which no patch or other fix is available. The vendor thus has zero days to prepare a patch, as the vulnerability has already been described or exploited.
There’s no fix other than security through layers.
That actually helps a lot, thanks!
I’ll try to ELI5, if there’s something you don’t understand ask me.
Op has a home server where he’s running immich, that’s only accessible when he’s at home via the IP, so something like http://192.168.0.3:3000/, so he installed Tailscale on that server. Tailscale is a VPN (Virtual Private Network) that allows you to connect to your stuff remotely, it’s a nice way to do it because it is P2P (peer-to-peer) which means that in theory only he can access that network, whereas if he were using one of the many VPNs people use for other reasons, other people on the same VPN could access his server.
Ok, so now he can access his immich instance away from home, all he has to do is connect to the VPN on his phone or laptop and he’ll be able to access it with something like http://my_server:3000 since Tailscale adds a DNS (Domain Name System) which resolves the hostnames to whatever IP they have on the Tailscale network.
But if you want to give your family access it’s hard to explain to them that they need to connect to this VPN, so he rented a VPS (Virtual Private Server) on some company like DigitalOcean or Vultr and connected that machine to the Tailscale network. He probably also got a domain name from somewhere like namecheap, and pointed that domain name to his VPS. Só now he can access his VPS by using
ssh user@myserver.com. Now all he needs to do is have something on the VPS which redirects everything that comes to a certain address into the Tailscale machine, Caddy is a nice way to do this, but the more traditional approach is ngnix, so if he puts Caddy on that VPS a config like this:immich.myserver.com { handle { reverse_proxy my_server.tailscale.network.name:3000 } }Then any requests that come to https://immich.myserver.com/ will get redirected to the home server via Tailscale.
It is a really nice setup, plus OP also added authentication and some other stuff to make it a bit more secure against attacks directly on immich.
Congrats! I just pulled off the same thing last week using cloudflare tunneling? The phrase “reverse proxy” scared me too much lol. So props to you.
Congratulations!
It feels really good when you learn something new and get it working the way you like.
If you want more challenges take a look at this:
This would be useful if you ever wanted to share albums with other people outside your tailscale network and that lack an account for your immich server.
Good job!
I’m still trying to understand what it is and why I would want it. I see several programs I use recommend it but I just don’t get what it does and why what it does is good.It does a couple things. It’s one service that routes requests to multiple services. So if you have radarr, sonarr, etc., you can put a reverse proxy in front and use the same ip-port to connect to all, and the proxy routes the request to the service by hostname.
If you have multiple instances of the same service for HA, it can load balance between them (though this is unlikely for a homelab).
Personally I run all my services through docker and put traefik in front, so that I don’t have to keep track of ports. It’s all by name.
It’s also nice because traefik handles HTTPS termination, so it automatically gets certs for each name, and the backing service never needs to worry about it (it’s http on the backend, but all that traffic is internal).
Thank you for the explanation. But that’s it than? Just convenience with ports?
Well it IS pretty nice to be able to tell people to go to jellyfin.example.com instead of example.com:8096, but you also get security benefits for using a properly set up reverse proxy. You don’t need to keep your ports open to the whole internet, only the reverse proxy accesses them. As far as the rest of the internet is concerned, you have :443 open.
I know that feeling ! My first service hosted via docker + Treafik outside my lan with a wireguard tunnel felt like a big dopamine hit ! Congrats !
Now I have over 20 services and It feels trivial :( I still love the easy to read/write syntax of Treafik ,however I feel like I’m missing a lot of important networking knowledge while avoiding Nginx !
Maybe one day when I’m too bored I will switch everything to Nginx, see how it goes !
Quick, now lean a firewall with a good IDS
and fail2ban
me too like last week!!! yay us!!
haven’t gotten oauth going yet but soon
Wow, so my understanding of the terms ‘reverse proxy’ and Tailscale must be wrong then, because I thought they were mutually exclusive. I’ll go do some more research, unless someone feels like explaining how you can do both at the same time.
Also, I think the ‘Risks’ section of this page is informative:
I think self hosting the proxy with the services at hobbyist scale mitigates most of the security risks. The single point of failure risk is another matter. I once had to effectively reverse-hack my services by uploading a Jenkins test job through an existing java project to regain access. Ever since then, I maintain a separate ddns address that’s just used for emergency ssh access.
Nice work! 😎
Just be sure to read up on network security and set yourself up for success! Even tunnels can still be an attack surface. Always keep everything up to date! And plan for the worst case.
Tailscale?
Is this setup advisable for the CGNATED environment?
You will need a VPS as your other endpoint
This is necessary for CGNat ISPs. That or cloudflared or ngrok or the like. Because you aren’t really routable on a CGNAT address.
In a nutshell, CGNAT users must spend money for something that people with IPv4 addresses can do for free 😔
We wouldn’t be in this mess if we switched to ipv6, but nOoOooOo… we can’t possibly do that…
Just out of curiosity, is the tail scale part of this required? If i just reverse proxy things and have them only protected from there by the login screen of the app being shown, that’s obviously less safe. But the attackers would still need to brute force my passwords to get any access? If they did, then they could do nasty things within the app, but limited to that app. Are there other vulnerabilities I’m not thinking about?
It’s not required, but probably OP has a home server with Immich and a VPS which exposes it to the internet. In that setup you need Tailscale for the VPS to access your home server. Sometimes you can’t directly expose your home server for different reasons, e.g. ISP doesn’t give you an external IP directly (I’ve had this, where my router would get a 10.x IP so I couldn’t port forward because the internet IP was being shared between multiple houses), or the ISP gives you a dynamic IP so there’s no guarantee that your IP won’t change next time you reset the router, etc.
Also it provides an extra layer of separation, so for example a DDOS would hit the VPS which probably has automatic countermeasures, and even if someone were to gain access to the VPS they still need an extra jump to get to the home server (obviously if they exploit something on immich they would get direct access to the home server).
Gotcha. Thanks for the insight!
It’s annoying, as I’d like to expose things for other people in my family (like Overseerr or whatever) without hassling them to also start a VPN or other stumbling block steps.
I was hoping that reverse proxy to overseerrs login screen would be safe enough. 8(
Does docker help limit things at all? I’m running my services through docker, which seems to limit the folders the container can hit. Feels like that would limit the damage someone could do even if they bypassed the login page of Overseerr or whatever app it is?
First of all let me make this absolutely clear, docker is not expected to be secure to that level. While they try to make it hard for someone to escape a container, it’s not their main concern so expect that there are vulnerabilities that would allow an attacker to escape.
Now the second thing, the Overseer login screen might be secure enough for your case, the problem is that login is hard to do right, and Overseer are doing several other stuff as well, so they might not give it enough emphasis, and even if they do, maybe Immich devs don’t, or any one of the dozens of other services, so there are dozen of possible points of failure. Things like Authelia or Google OAuth are focused on authentication, so they do that absolutely right, and then they become the only point of failure for authentication.
To be fair, if you keep things updated it’s unlikely not having auth would be a problem. Mostly because most hackers won’t even know of your server to begin with. And most systems are secure enough for most casual hacks. But it’s an investment worth the time if you plan on making something available to the internet.
The attack surface might be an entire API, not just your login screen. You have no idea what that first page implements that could be used to gain access.
You can improve this by putting a basic auth challenge at least in front of the applications webpage. That would drastically reduce the potential endpoints.
Thanks for the insight! Does running this in a docker container help limit the damage at all? Seems like they’d only be able to access the few folders I have the container access to?
Maybe a bit, but if you’re not running rootless docker if they get out of that container they’ll have the run of your docker host. It is a lot of layers to crack, but sometimes they’ve got nothing but time, or it’s been so long since the containers been updated that its trivial. That’s why rootless docker or podman, and Watchtower are your friends.
Also, vlan off your exposed surface and build firewall rules for the VPN and LAN inbound to it, and specific outbound rules if you need those servers to reach into those networks themselves.
