Just exposed Immich via a remote and reverse proxy using Caddy and tailscale tunnel. I’m securing Immich using OAuth.
I don’t have very nerdy friends so not many people appreciate this.
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Congratulations!
It feels really good when you learn something new and get it working the way you like.
If you want more challenges take a look at this:
This would be useful if you ever wanted to share albums with other people outside your tailscale network and that lack an account for your immich server.
Wrapping my head around reverse proxy was a game changer for me. I could finally host things that are usefull outside my LAN. I use Nginx-Proxy-Manager which makes the config simple for lazy’s like me.
Used to mess around with multiple Apache Proxy Servers. When I left that job I found Docker and (amongst other things) NPM and I swear, I stared at the screen in disbelief on how easy the setup and config was. All that time we wasted on Apache, the issues, the upgrades, the nightmare in setting it all up…
If I were to do that job again I would not hesitate to use NPM 100% and stop wasting my time with that Apache Proxy mess.
Do you serve things to a public? Like a website? Because unless you’re serving a public, that’s dumb to do… and you really don’t understand the purpose of it.
If all you wanted was the ability to access services remotely, then you should have just created a WireGuard tunnel and set your phone/laptop/whatever to auto connect through it as soon as you drop your home Wifi.
A lemmy instance, a wiki, and a couple of other website type things, yes.
Publicly facing things are pretty limited, but it’s still super handy inside the LAN with Adguard Home doing DNS rewrites to point it to the reverse proxy.
I appreciate what you’re saying, though. A lot of people get in trouble by having things like Radarr etc. open to the internet through their reverse proxy.
Am I making a mistake by having my Jellyfin server proxied through nginx? The other service I set up did need to be public so I just copied the same thing when I set up Jellyfin but is that a liability even with a password to access?
This is very short sighted. I can think of dozens of things to put on the open internet that aren’t inherently public. The majority are things for sharing with multiple people you want to have logins for. As long as the exposed endpoints are secure, there’s no inherent problem.
And yet you’ve not provided one example, hmmmm
Seriously?
Plex, Jellyfin, VaultWarden, AdGuard, Home Assistant, GameVault, any flavor of pastebin, any flavor of wiki, and the list goes on.
If you’re feeling spicy throw whatever the hell you want onto a reverse proxy and put it behind a zero trust login.
The idea that opening up anything at all through to the open internet is “dumb” is antiquated. Are there likely concerns that need to be addressed? Absolutely. But don’t make blanket statements about virtually nothing belonging on the open internet.
None of those have to be public and can all be accessed with WireGuard. You just proved my point, moron
Why don’t we just throw Lemmy behind wireguard while we’re at it.
Literally anything can go behind a VPN. Doesn’t mean much at all. And the majority of those are commonly left on the open internet for friends and family, which would be annoying af to set up with WireGuard.
I have enough issues dealing with VPN issues in my professional life, I don’t want to have to deal with them in my personal life as well.
Can someone ELI5? I’m a noob who aspires to set up immich in the near future. I only recently started making efforts to separate myself from the cloud. So far I’ve got a wireguard server set up and I’ve disconnected both my Bambu printers from the cloud and I’m currently setting up some home assistant stuff. Pretty soon I’m hoping to set up a NAS, Immich, Plex (or similar) and replace my google nest cameras.
I’ll try to ELI5, if there’s something you don’t understand ask me.
Op has a home server where he’s running immich, that’s only accessible when he’s at home via the IP, so something like http://192.168.0.3:3000/, so he installed Tailscale on that server. Tailscale is a VPN (Virtual Private Network) that allows you to connect to your stuff remotely, it’s a nice way to do it because it is P2P (peer-to-peer) which means that in theory only he can access that network, whereas if he were using one of the many VPNs people use for other reasons, other people on the same VPN could access his server.
Ok, so now he can access his immich instance away from home, all he has to do is connect to the VPN on his phone or laptop and he’ll be able to access it with something like http://my_server:3000 since Tailscale adds a DNS (Domain Name System) which resolves the hostnames to whatever IP they have on the Tailscale network.
But if you want to give your family access it’s hard to explain to them that they need to connect to this VPN, so he rented a VPS (Virtual Private Server) on some company like DigitalOcean or Vultr and connected that machine to the Tailscale network. He probably also got a domain name from somewhere like namecheap, and pointed that domain name to his VPS. Só now he can access his VPS by using
ssh user@myserver.com. Now all he needs to do is have something on the VPS which redirects everything that comes to a certain address into the Tailscale machine, Caddy is a nice way to do this, but the more traditional approach is ngnix, so if he puts Caddy on that VPS a config like this:immich.myserver.com { handle { reverse_proxy my_server.tailscale.network.name:3000 } }Then any requests that come to https://immich.myserver.com/ will get redirected to the home server via Tailscale.
It is a really nice setup, plus OP also added authentication and some other stuff to make it a bit more secure against attacks directly on immich.
Pretty much I have caddy on a VPS that’s pointing to my internal IP using a tailscale tunnel. You are still exposing the web gui to the Internet so I just changed authentication to OAuth to mitigate since risk. There is still a possibility of attacks via zero days, but my immich is on a VM and I’m creating firewall rules to just allow certain ports out.
I appreciate the extra details but I still don’t know what “caddy”, “VPS”, “tailscale tunnel”, or “zero days” are, but I can look it up.
It’s hard to explain from scratch.
Caddy is a reverse proxy software that essentially redirects traffic from a certain port to another port. For example external:port => internal:port. It also enables SSL encryption meaning everything will be encrypted en route between the external and the user.
VPS is a virtual private server. Just someone else’s computer you can expose to the Internet.
Tailscale is a mesh VPN that uses wire guard as its transport. I use this to tunnel between my VPS and my Immich server to hide my home IP and to allow encrypted traffic between my Immich server and my VPS.
A zero-day (also known as a 0-day) is a vulnerability in software or hardware that is typically unknown to the vendor and for which no patch or other fix is available. The vendor thus has zero days to prepare a patch, as the vulnerability has already been described or exploited.
There’s no fix other than security through layers.
Just out of curiosity, is the tail scale part of this required? If i just reverse proxy things and have them only protected from there by the login screen of the app being shown, that’s obviously less safe. But the attackers would still need to brute force my passwords to get any access? If they did, then they could do nasty things within the app, but limited to that app. Are there other vulnerabilities I’m not thinking about?
I don’t think a tailscale tunnel helps this anyway, maybe just from standard antispoofing and geoblocks, but it still gets to the application in full eventually, when they can do what they’d do if it was directly exposed. The attack surface might be an entire API, not just your login screen. You have no idea what that first page implements that could be used to gain access. And they could request another page that has an entirely different surface.
If someone has Nextcloud exposed, I’m not stopping at the /login page that comes up by default and hitting it with a rainbow table; I’m requesting remote.php where all the access goodies are. That has a huge surface that bypasses the login screen entirely, might not be rate limited, and maybe there’s something in webdav that’s vulnerable enough that I don’t need a correct token, I just need to confuse remote.php into letting me try to pop it.
You can improve this by putting a basic auth challenge at least in front of the applications webpage. That would drastically reduce the potential endpoints.
Thanks for the insight! Does running this in a docker container help limit the damage at all? Seems like they’d only be able to access the few folders I have the container access to?
Like, good for you, man.
But you should really keep your stuff inside the VPN and not expose things, it opens up a pile of potential risks that you don’t need to have. You can still use a reverse proxy inside the VPN and use your own DNS server that spits out that internal address to your devices for your various applications. If you absolutely, positively must have something exposed directly, put it on it’s own VLAN and with no access to anything you value.
I want to be able to upload/download/share my photos from anywhere in the world without using a VPN. Additionally, this satisfies the wife requirement. It works in the background without her needing her to turn on the VPN. I don’t want her to keep asking me how do I turn on the VPN? If it’s just me, then no issue, I’ll use a VPN.
To be fair, wireguard is pretty painless.
You set up the VPN and it’s always on. There’s no hassle.
Unless you’re on IOS that will shut your VPN off regularly. Or you want somebody else to be able to access what you’re hosting without having to walk theme through a VPN setup they won’t understand.
I have a couple dozen customers on ios that use their camera servers via Tailscale. Never had a peep about that sort of thing.
And the last is the typical sort of “convenience” that gets people popped.
You’re hearing about it now. It’s an issue with the way iOS handles background tasks and there isn’t any way to fix it. It’s just how the OS works.
Well, apparently a bunch of farmers are smart enough to press a button without even bothering me about it.
Why would farmers not be smart enough to press buttons?
Don’t listen to this guy. You don’t have to turtle all your stuff inside a VPN if you don’t want to. Hosting services on the internet is what the internet was created for. It’s up to you whether what you want to host is exposed to the internet or not, and as long as you’re aware of the risks do what you want man. I will mention that Immich specifically might not be the best idea to expose since it’s so unstable, but that depends on your level of comfortability. Worst case scenario is somebody gets into your Immich and can see all your photos. Would this be a dealbreaker for you? If so don’t expose it publicly. Otherwise you’re perfectly fine.
Nobody said they had to. I made him aware of the risks in case he wasn’t. You seem to have an axe to grind there.
I’m not a big fan of amateur know-nothings regurgitating the same nonsense regurgitated to them by previous know-nothings, attempting to further the cycle to people finding their footing with self hosting, telling everybody what they “should” do based on their own limited understabding. It was a big problem on the self hosted reddit and up to this point has been less of a problem here.
And yet here you are, making sure this guy knows he can expose anything he wants except the specific thing you decided is troublesome like immich. Maybe you’ll be here to help him put it all back together with your wealth of knowledge and experience.
Take a hard look at yourself, you’re doing all the stuff you accuse someone else of. Maybe you aren’t always the smartest person in the room. In any case, I’m done with your shit. Go ruin someone else’s day, you ray of sunshine.
