this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
29 points (91.4% liked)

Selfhosted

38768 readers
117 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

If your only goal is working https then as the other comment correctly suggests you can do DNS-01 authentication with Let’s Encrypt + Certbot + Some brand of dyndns

However the other comment is incorrect in stating that you need to expose a HTTP server. This method means you don’t need to expose anything. For instance if you do it with HA:

https://github.com/home-assistant/addons/blob/master/letsencrypt/DOCS.md

Certbot uses the API of your DDNS provider to authenticate the cert request by adding a txt record and then pulls the cert. No proxies no exposed servers and no fuss. Point the A record at your Rfc1918 IP.

You can then configure your DNS to keep serving cached responses. I think though that ssl will still be broken while your connection is down but you will be able to access your services.

Edit to add: I don’t understand why so many of the HTTPS tutorials are so complicated and so focused on adding a proxy into the mix even when remote access isn’t the target.

Cert bot is a shell script. It asks the Lets Encrypt api for a secret key. It adds the key as a txt record on a subdomain of the domain you want a certificate for. Let’s encrypt confirms the key is there and spits out a cert. You add the cert to whatever server it belongs to, or ideally Certbot does that for you. That’s it, working https. And all you have to expose is the rfc1918 address. This, to me at least, is preferable to proxies and exposed servers.