I want my self hosted things to use https. For example, I have Jellyfin installed via docker, and I want it to use https instead of http.
I don’t care about necessarily doing this the “right” way, as I won’t be making Jellyfin or any other service public, and will only be using it on my local network.
What is the easiest way to do this? Assume everything I host is in docker. Also a link to a tutorial would be great.
Thanks!
The easiest way to do it is to do it the right way with LetsEncrypt. The hardest way to do it is the wrong way, where you create your own CA, import it as a root CA into all of the machines you’ll be accessing your servers from, then create and sign your own certs using your CA to use in your servers.
This, letsencrypt with dns challenge, https://desec.io/ to manage the dns records https://github.com/go-acme/lego or traefik to manage the certificates and do the dns challenges for you.
Yes, LetsEncrypt with DNS-01 challenge is the easiest way to go. Be it a single wildcard for all hosts or not.
Running a CA is cool however, just be aware of the risks involved with running your own CA.
You’re adding a root certificate to your systems that will effectively accept any certificate issued with your CA’s key. If your PK gets stolen somehow and you don’t notice it, someone might be issuing certificates that are valid for those machines. Also real CA’s also have ways to revoke certificates that are checked by browsers (OCSP and CRLs), they may employ other techniques such as cross signing and chains of trust. All those make it so a compromised certificate is revoked and not trusted by anyone after the fact.
Running a CA is cool however, just be aware of the risks involved with running your own CA.
All they say that if the private key is stolen then you’re screwed. Think about it, if an attacker can:
- Get into your network.
- Presumably bypass key-based ssh/container runtime protections
- Access pod/VM which is running the CA
- Bypass default MAC settings (Apparmor on debian, SELinux on RHEL)
- Steal private key without you knowing from your logs
You have a much bigger problem my friend
While I agree with you, an attacker may not need to go to such lengths in order to get the PK. The admin might misplace it or have a backup somewhere in plain text. People aren’t also prone to look to logs and it might be too late when they actually noticed that the CA was compromised.
Managing an entire CA safely and deploying certificates > complex; Getting let’s encrypt certificates using DNS challenges > easy;
why is creating one’s own CA the wrong way? I don’t want to have to pay cloudflare or porkbun to run HTTPS at home
Because you have to manage it on your server and all your own machines, and it doesn’t provide any value if your server is hacked. It actually makes you less safe if your server is hacked, because then you can consider every machine that has that CA as compromised. There’s no reason to use HTTPS if you’re running your own CA. If you don’t trust your router, you shouldn’t trust anything you do on your network. Just use HTTP or use a port forward to localhost through ssh if you don’t trust your own network.
You don’t have to pay anyone to use HTTPS at home. Just use a free subdomain and HTTP validation for certbot.
I agree that it’s the wrong way, but not because of any of this other than the first half of the first sentence.
It’s the hard/wrong way because it means you are having to be responsible for securing the root cert private keys and because most people will do it wrong and set up a root cert with the ability to sign not just tls certs, and that’s where the problems can occur if the keys are compromised and you’ve set up all of your machines to trust it.
But it’s also not true that you shouldn’t use HTTPS or that you should trust your own network, not because of the router, but because of the devices. People don’t control their devices anymore. Many home automation devices, nanny cams, security devices, water leak detectors, etc., contain firmware that is poorly configured and can easily expose your network traffic if it’s not encrypted. Not to mention a lot of apps these days on smartphones are Trojans for spyware, Temu, WeChat, etc.
And as for cost, you can get a domain name for a few dollars per year or as mentioned, a subdomain from something like a DDNS service, so it definitely can be totally free to do it the right way.
IPv6 addresses and letsencrypt
If your addresses are globally unique, you don’t have to care about internal or external
The easiest way is to pay for a public domain, use a subdomain of that which does not have an A record on the wide internet, and then use certbot to get Let’s Encrypt certificates for them and auto-renew. Stuff these in your individual reverse-proxy instances (or propagate them, no idea how) and you’re done
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
| Fewer Letters | More Letters |
|---|---|
| CA | (SSL) Certificate Authority |
| DNS | Domain Name Service/System |
| HTTP | Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web |
| HTTPS | HTTP over SSL |
| IP | Internet Protocol |
| SMTP | Simple Mail Transfer Protocol |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption |
| TLS | Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL |
| nginx | Popular HTTP server |
9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 5 acronyms.
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I roll out Step CA to my workstation with an Ansible role. All other clients on the lab trust this CA and are allowed to request certificates for themselves through ACME, like LetsEncrypt.
All my services on all clients on the network are exposed through traefik, which also handles the ACME process.
When it comes to Jellyfin, this is entirely counter-productive. Your media server needs to be accessible to be useful. Jellyfin should be run with host networking to enable DLNA, which will never pass through TLS. Additionally, not all clients support custom CAs. Chromecast or the OS on a TV are prime candidates to break once you move your Jellyfin entirely behind a proxy with custom CA certificates. You can waste a lot of time on this and achieve very little. If you only use the web UI for Jellyfin, then you might not care, but I prefer to keep this service out of the fancy HTTPS setup.
Just be aware of the risks involved with running your own CA.
Fuck that. People like to act like running an SMTP server or a CA is some major shit, while everyone is fucking up on these subjects every single day.
SMTP with good delivery and whatnot is entirely possible it just takes an IP with a good reputation and enough patience to read and understand the ISPmail guide and a few other details. Running a CA is a security vulnerability and a major pain if you plan to deploy it to the devices of your entire family.
