Hi selfhosting community :)
I am hosting some services on a NixOS box (Immich, Nextcloud and some others). So far I had no problem reaching my services, just via tailscale when I am not at home.
But now I wanted to branch out and get a little fancy with https setup and a domain, so I can share my services with friends. I followed this guide and got a domain at cloudflare. However I ran into some problems.
The relevant setup:
spoiler
Nextcloud:
services.nextcloud = {
enable = true;
hostName = "nextcloud.<mydomain>.com";
https = true;
};
Nginx:
services.nginx = {
enable = true;
virtualHosts = {
"nextcloud.<mydomain>.com" = {
forceSSL = true;
useACMEHost = "<mydomain>.com";
};
"immich.<mydomain>.com" = {
forceSSL = true;
useACMEHost = "<mydomain>.com";
locations."/".proxyPass = "http://127.0.0.1:2283/";
};
"immich.<machine>.<tailnet>.net" = {
locations."/".proxyPass = "http://127.0.0.1:2283/";
};
};
};
ACME
security.acme = {
acceptTerms = true;
defaults.email = "my@mail.com";
certs."<mydomain>.com" = {
domain = "*.<mydomain>.com";
group = "nginx";
dnsProvider = "cloudflare";
dnsPropagationCheck = true;
credentialsFile = config.sops.secrets.cloudflare.path;
};
};
My situation now is the following:
- I can reach eg. Immich by going to http://<machine>.<tailnet>.net:2283 (https is not working here).
- I can not reach Immich by the domains I have setup in my Nginx configuration. So “immich.<machine>.<tailnet>.net” & “immich.<mydomain>.com” give a “Server not found” error. I tried both 127.0.0.1 and the tailscale IP of the server in the proxyPass section.
Does one of you network wizards know where the problem lies? Or how would I go about troubleshooting the issue?
I found that the cname record seemed to be the problem. Here someone had the same issue. After changing now to a wildcard A record pointing to the tailscale ip, it all magically works. Thanks for all the answers!
Have you pointed your DNS record to your tailscale IP? I have the exact setup you describe, and it works fine.
Yes, similar to the video guide, I set up a wildcard CNAME record to point to <machine>.<tailnet>.net.
I see. I dont know if that works, as I haven’t done that, but what worked for me was pointing to the tailnet IP, not the tailnet domain, then disabling expiry for my server on the tailscale dashboard so my IP would stay the same.
This approach largely works, with the caveat that it then requires you to always be on the tailnet. If someone wants to connect locally AND via tailnet using the same URL, they’ll need to push/advertise routes (or do some other hacky thing)
If you run adguard home it’s pretty easy. Just add a DNS rewrite to your local IP.
Yes, in order to access my domain on my local network, I have my pihole instance point the domain to my server’s local IP.
I don’t have a problem to always be on the tailnet with my client devices, but it does not work even for this case.
How are you running nginx and immich exactly? With containers or on the host?I don’t know nixos that much but that looks like nixos configuration to me, so it’s running on the host I assume?
Yes, correct. So far I was able to access the services via <tailscale ip of the host>:<port> on any device in my tailnet.
Right now, I’ve only got the spoons to provide rough guidance, not details. In order to use non-tailnet IPs, you’ll need to configure your tailnet host to “advertise routes/push routes”. In more laymen terms, tailnet needs to say, “hey network client, I do know where 192.168.0.69 is! So I can route that request”. By default, each tailnet host only advertises the other tailnet hosts. Anything else fails.
Also, I really appreciate how detailed your question is!
