I’ve been using Linux for decades, I’ve worked as a software engineer/architect/sre for around a decade, but networking has always been my biggest gap in knowledge.
I have a local server, I have caddy spun up, a glinet router running their version of openwrt, and I have a domain name purchased through porkbun.
I am looking to setup “local.domain.com” to point to my local server, ideally without exposing it publicly, and enable devices on my home network to be able to access it from that url. Id also like to be able to access containers running on that server by something like “searxng.local.domain.com” or “local.domain.com/searxng” aka without using the port suffix. Id also like to enable https.
I have read so many guides that have fragments of what I need, but nothing that ties enough together to get it working. And with all the options around different domain registers, let’s encrypt, reverse proxies, etc, im struggling just a bit.
Are their any guides (prefer text over YouTube, but beggars cant be choosers) that people recommend that encompass the whole process, instead of just pieces? Id like to understand it instead of just fumble through it.
My current setup for this:
I own a domain - say homelab.com - and use it exclusively in my internal network.
The public DNS records do only resolve to 127.0.0.1 (as my domain holster doesn’t want me to have no A record).
In my home network I have a pihole running that resolves this domain and it’s subdomains locally (say pihole.homelab.com, proxmox.homelab.com and so on).
For HTTPs: As this server is not publicly reachable, I use the DNS API of my domain host to get a let’s encrypt certificate with the DNS-01 challenge. That way, the internal systems do not need to be exposed to the internet.
Edit: Caddy can do DNS-01, but you usually have to compile it yourself to include the plugin for your provider. To circumvent that, I’m just using plain old certbot and told Caddy to use the certs that are already on the machine