Are you looking for the best way to open your self-hosted services up to the internet? Whether you’re wanting to host your own website at home or play Minecraft with friends, Cloudflare Tunnels is what you should use—not Nginx Proxy Manager.Nginx Proxy Manager opens security holes up in your network Port forwarding is fine until it’s not When someone visits a domain name, their DNS provider routs them to an IP.With Nginx Proxy Manager, that IP has to be your home IP address, and then you need ports 80 and 443 open on your router to accept the traffic.
This requires a few moving parts to be put in place: dynamic DNS (to update your IP when your ISP changes it) and port forwarding.Not all routers support port forwarding, and not all ISPs make it easy to have a fixed IP target for your websites.I recently was at my dad’s house trying to help him get some services up and running on a server I brought him, and we had a pretty tough time getting port forwarding to work for him.
After a few hours, I finally was able to get it to work, but it was a pretty big pain.Sadly, this is just the nature of the beast with Nginx Proxy Manager.While Nginx is known the world over as a reliable server management platform, it does have its limitations, and none of them are actually related to Nginx.
However, if you’re still wanting to open up some self-hosted services to the wider internet, there’s a better way—Cloudflare Tunnels.Related 10 Tools Every Homelabber Should Try at Least Once I bet you haven't used at least one of these homelab tools.Posts 6 By Patrick Campanale When I first heard of Cloudflare Tunnels, I’ll admit, I didn’t think it would be a good option for me.
I didn’t look into it deeply at first, but I assumed it was something akin to a VPN tunnel because of the name, meaning it would only open services up for your own use, not public use.Because of this, I avoided it and set up Nginx Proxy Manager in my own homelab, but I wish I had just gone with Cloudflare Tunnels instead.Cloudflare Tunnels open services up to the world with ease No port forwarding required With Cloudflare Tunnels, you simply install the cloudflared client on your server and it opens up a tunnel Cloudflare—and that’s it.
This tunnel to Cloudflare is a link from your server to the Cloudflare servers, and Cloudflare handles everything else.Within Cloudflare Tunnels, you can configure where you want the IP to point.You could host Cloudflare Tunnels on a Raspberry PI, but point it to a different local IP in your network if you have a service running on a different computer.
Practically, it’s very similar to Nginx Proxy Manager.Functionally, it’s very different.Related Self-Hosting Isn’t Just for Nerds Anymore—Here’s Why You Should Care You don't need a network engineering degree to self-host services anymore.
Posts By Patrick Campanale Since Cloudflare Tunnels opens a tunnel from your server to the Cloudflare servers, no port forwarding or dynamic DNS is needed at all.Cloudflare simply handles it all.In fact, Cloudflare doesn’t even need to know your IP to work.
The way it functions is someone visits your domain name, which points to the Cloudflare Tunnel and then that traffic gets routed through the tunnel to your system.It’s much more secure than opening ports and leaves you less exposed to the internet than Nginx Proxy Manager does.Set up Cloudflare Tunnels before your homelab gets too big I wish I would have set it up sooner When I first set up my homelab, I went the route of Nginx Proxy Manager.
I had worked with Nginx for years already, so it was an obvious choice for me—or so I thought.Looking back, I wish I would have started with Cloudflare Tunnels.It’s a simpler system and doesn’t rely on my own network to be configured for external access.
I have changed what server runs Nginx Proxy Manager several times now, and I always have to go in and update the port forwarding on my router whenever I do that.Sometimes I remember right away, sometimes I forget until I go to access a service that needs it, because, even though Nginx Proxy Manager might be running, the router isn’t forwarding ports where it needs to.With Cloudflare Tunnels, you just re-install the tunnel on the new system and it’s up and working right away.
So, before your homelab gets too big (like my 41 Nginx Proxy Manager entries), set up Cloudflare Tunnels.It’s easy to do in the beginning, and it’s something that you won’t regret setting up.Related 6 things you need to host a website from home this weekend It's really not as hard as you think to host your own website.
Posts By Patrick Campanale
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