Hello people, I recently rented a vps server from OVH and I want to start hosting my own piefed instance and a couple other services. I am running debian 13 with docker, and I have nginx proxy manager almost set up. I want to set up subdomains so when I do social.my.domain it will go to my piefed instance, but how do I tell the machine to send piefed traffic to this subdomain and joplin traffic (for example) to another domain? Can I use nginx/docker natively for that or do I have to install another program. Thanks for the advice.
The job of a reverse proxy like nginx is exactly this. Take traffic coming from one source (usually port 443 HTTPS) and forward it somewhere else based on things like the (sub)domain. A HTTPS reverse proxy often also forwards the traffic as HTTP on the local machine, so the software running the service doesn’t have to worry about ssl.
Be sure to get yourself a firewall on that machine. VPSes are usually directly connected to the internet without NAT in between. If you don’t have a firewall, all internal services will be accessible, stuff like databases or the internal ports of the services you host.
What service would you recommenced for firewall. The firewall I use on my laptop is ufw, should I use that on the vps or is their a different service that works better?
UFW works well, and is easy to configure. UFW is a great option if you don’t need the flexibility (and insane complexity) that manually managing iptables rules offers,