I have played around with yunohost and other similar tools. I know how to open ports on router, configure port forwarding. I am also interested on hosting my own stuff for experiments, but I also have a VPN enabled for privacy reasons on my router at all times. If you haven’t guessed already, I am very reserved on revealing my home IP for selfhosting, as contradictory as it sounds.
I am aware that it’s better to rent a VPS, not to mention the dynamic IP issues, but here it goes: assuming my VPN provider permits port forwarding, is it possible to selfhost anything from behind a VPN, including the virtual machine running all the necessary softwares?
edit: title
edit2: I just realized my VPN provider is discontinuing port forwarding next month. Why?!
Hopefully this will help someone. This seems to work for me. Subscribed communities update, I am able to post. I’m the only user right now on my server. NPM took me a bit of messing around with the config but I think I have everything working, some of this may be redundant / non functional but I don’t have the will to go line by line to see what more I can take out. Here is how I have it configured. Note that some things go to the Lemmy UI port and some to the Lemmy port. These should be defined in your docker-compose if you’re using that. (Mine is below)
On the first tab in NPM, “Details” I have the following:
Scheme: http Hostname: <docker ip> Port: <lemmy-ui port> Block Common Exploits and Websockets Support are enabled.
On the Custom Locations page, I added 4 locations, you have to do one for each directory even though the ip/ports are the same.
Location: /api Scheme: http Hostname: <docker ip> Port: <lemmy port>
Repeat the above for “/feeds”, “/pictrs”, and “/nodeinfo”. The example file they give also says to have “.well_known” in there but as far as I know that’s just for Let’s Encrypt which NPM should be handling for us.
On the SSL tab, I have a Let’s Encrypt certificate set up. Force SSL, HTTP/2 Support, and HSTS Enabled.
On the Advanced tab, I have the following:
location / { set $proxpass "http://<docker ip>:<lemmy-ui port>"; if ($http_accept = "application/activity+json") { set $proxpass "http://<docker ip>:<lemmy-ui port>";` } if ($http_accept = "application/ld+json; profile=\"https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams\"") { set $proxpass "http://<docker ip>:<lemmy-ui port>"; } if ($request_method = POST) { set $proxpass "http://<docker ip>:<lemmy-ui port>"; } proxy_pass $proxpass; rewrite ^(.+)/+$ $1 permanent; # Send actual client IP upstream proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr; proxy_set_header Host $host; proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for; }
I probably should add in my docker compose file as well… I’m far from a docker expert. This is reasonably close to their examples and others I found. I removed nginx from in here since we already have a proxy. I disabled all the debug logging because it was using disk space. I also removed all the networking lines because I’m not smart enough to figure it all out right now. If you use this, look out for the < > sections, you need to set your own domain/hostname, and postgres user/password.
version: "3.3" services: lemmy: image: dessalines/lemmy:0.17.3 hostname: lemmy restart: always ports: - 8536:8536 environment: - RUST_LOG="warn" - RUST_BACKTRACE=full volumes: - ./lemmy.hjson:/config/config.hjson:Z depends_on: - postgres - pictrs lemmy-ui: image: dessalines/lemmy-ui:0.17.4 # use this to build your local lemmy ui image for development # run docker compose up --build # assuming lemmy-ui is cloned besides lemmy directory # build: # context: ../../lemmy-ui # dockerfile: dev.dockerfile ports: - 1234:1234 environment: # this needs to match the hostname defined in the lemmy service - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_INTERNAL_HOST=lemmy:8536 # set the outside hostname here - LEMMY_UI_LEMMY_EXTERNAL_HOST=< domain name> - LEMMY_HTTPS=false - LEMMY_UI_DEBUG=true depends_on: - lemmy restart: always pictrs: image: asonix/pictrs:0.4.0-beta.19 # this needs to match the pictrs url in lemmy.hjson hostname: pictrs # we can set options to pictrs like this, here we set max. image size and forced format for conversion # entrypoint: /sbin/tini -- /usr/local/bin/pict-rs -p /mnt -m 4 --image-format webp environment: - PICTRS_OPENTELEMETRY_URL=http://otel:4137 - PICTRS__API_KEY=API_KEY - RUST_LOG=debug - RUST_BACKTRACE=full - PICTRS__MEDIA__VIDEO_CODEC=vp9 - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_WIDTH=256 - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_HEIGHT=256 - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_AREA=65536 - PICTRS__MEDIA__GIF__MAX_FRAME_COUNT=400 user: 991:991 volumes: - ./volumes/pictrs:/mnt:Z restart: always postgres: image: postgres:15-alpine # this needs to match the database host in lemmy.hson # Tune your settings via # https://pgtune.leopard.in.ua/#/ # You can use this technique to add them here # https://stackoverflow.com/a/30850095/1655478 hostname: postgres command: [ "postgres", "-c", "session_preload_libraries=auto_explain", "-c", "auto_explain.log_min_duration=5ms", "-c", "auto_explain.log_analyze=true", "-c", "track_activity_query_size=1048576", ] ports: # use a different port so it doesnt conflict with potential postgres db running on the host - "5433:5432" environment: - POSTGRES_USER=< dbuser > - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=< dbpassword> - POSTGRES_DB=lemmy volumes: - ./volumes/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data:Z restart: always