Self-hosting Adventures Part 2

In order to run all the different services from a single server, I used a number of virtual hosts pointing to different applications/ports on the server. I used nginx and server blocks to get this done. I also wanted to make sure that I used HTTPS/TLS for all kinds of web traffic. That leads us into the first part of the configuration.

Obtaining a self-signed certificate

First of all, big shoutout to the team at Let’s Encrypt for their incredible work. For anyone wondering how their service works to provide trusted self-signed certificates, I highly recommend reading how it works. Now let’s dive into the process.

I followed this guide from Digital Ocean to generate my certificate. Instead of just the two domains (as with the example in that guide), I specified all of my planned host names, and it was quite a big list. I also had to make sure that the A records of all those host names existed with my domain registrar. Once I had my self-signed certificate, I was having a little trouble setting up my singular certificate with all of my different server blocks. After some ducking, however, I finally figured it out and now my /etc/nginx/sites-available/default file kind of looks like this:

server {
    listen 443 tls;
    server_name sadmansk.com;

    # certificate directives (from the guide linked above)
    .
    .
    # location and other directives
    .
    .
}
# other services had blocks similar to this
server {
    listen 443 tls;
    server_name *host*.sadmansk.com;
    
    location \ {
        

Redirecting Traffic

I added the following blocks, one for redirecting HTTP traffic to HTTPS and the other for removing www as a hostname:

# HTTP redirects to HTTPS
server {
    listen 80;
    server_name *.sadmansk.com;
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}
# redirect WWW
server {
    listen 443;
    server_name www.sadmansk.com;
    return 301 $scheme://sadmansk.com$request_uri;
}

Virtual Hosts

For applications that ran on various ports on the machines, I setup reverse proxies inside their respective server blocks:

    location /  {
        proxy_set_header        Host $host;
        proxy_set_header        X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
    proxy_set_header        X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;

        proxy_pass              http://localhost:PORT/;
    }

Setting up the virtual host for Gitlab was a little trickier. I followed the instructions on this section of the documentation to make it work properly.

And that’s pretty much it for the webserver! Next up, I’ll focus on how my Gitlab instance is setup, and how I take advantage of Gitlab CI for deploying my website and blog.