Nothing crazy in this post, I just wanna brag about setting up nginx for my media server.
My media sharing journey has been long, with a number of huge upgrades to my setup. I started in January, where I would torrent movies and shows and stream them over discord to my girlfriend.
In February, the wonderful people of the fediverse convinced me to try Linux, so I installed Fedora Linux on my pc (I absolutely love it and will never go back), I learned so much about Linux in just a few weeks, and wanted to try self hosting, so I installed jellyfin on my computer for just me and my girlfriend.
In late February (maybe March?), I got a homelab server running to install jellyfin, I had nothing else on it, jellyfin wasn’t even installed through docker (I was afraid of docker). I would manually transfer torrented movies/shows from my pc to the server via sftp clients.
Eventually, i think May, I introduced some friends/ family to my media server, and realized I needed to scale up a bit, so I setup the full arr stack with jellyseerr and qBitTorrent and migrated jellyfin to docker.
A few weeks ago, i finally figured out hardware acceleration with my old nvidia graphics card, as it was being a pain in the ass previously. Up to this point, everyone would just connect with my homes external ip and port forwarding.
This brings us to yesterday, my isp, Comcast, had a “planned” outage that they didn’t warn anyone about. Which ended up changing my ip so none of my friends/family could access anything until I figured out what happened. So, I finally decided to setup a ddns with noip, and looked into nginx and reverse proxies. After a few trials and tribulations, people can now access everything on the server without sticking a port on the end of a url/ip. Along the way i also started hosting my own team speak and factorio servers
Now I’m just wondering if there’s anything else that’ll make a huge improvement like everything else mentioned, I don’t think there’s anything else I could even want, except upgrading the actual server hardware with more storage
Did you follow a specific guide or refer to specific documentation for the reverse proxy? I’ve tried (admittedly not super hard) multiple times to set one up with nginx with no luck.
As much as I hate to admit it, I asked ChatGPT, because like you, I couldn’t find any good tutorials/guides about setting it up, ultimately ChatGPT gave me exactly the information I needed, if you need some help I can send a template config thingy later
Providing documentation to something that you don’t know is one of its few really solid uses. If it misses a detail or doesn’t get it right on the first try, it’s still probably faster than you starting from scratch, RTFM.
No worries. But be sure to research what you setup for it being sane or secure.
As for myself: I had significant help from a fellow dude on discord answering many of my stupid questions.
Everyone had to begin at one point ;)
Vanilla nginx is still too far over my head, but Nginx Proxy Manager makes easy work of it.
A lot of people like Caddy but I’ve never tried it. The config files are much simpler and it auto-renews certificates (but so does Nginx Proxy Manager).
Straight up reverse proxy isn’t bad. I think it’s only a couple lines in a file.
But when you want to add let’s encrypt and dynamic DNS. It starts to get a little bit meatier.
If you’ve got a docker host, nginx proxy manager is super simple. Aside from a super basic docker compose file, the rest of the config can be done via the web gui.
If you’re on proxmox, there’s a helper script for creating an nginx proxy manager lxc, and the rest can be done via the web gui as well.
It’s been a minute since I’ve done this in proxmox, but this video should help get you over the hump. Good luck!