I’m looking into replacing cloudflare with a VPS running a reverse proxy over a VPN, however, every solution I see so far assumes you’re running Docker, either for the external reverse proxy host or the services you’re self hosting.
The VPS is already virtualized (perhaps actually containerized given how cheap I am) so I don’t want to put Docker on top of that. The stuff I’m self hosting is running in Proxmox containers on a 15 year old laptop, so again, don’t want to make a virtual turducken.
Besides, Docker just seems like a pain to manage. I don’t think it was designed for use as a way to distribute turnkey appliances to end users. It was made for creating reproducible ephemeral development environments. Why else would you have to specify that you want a storage volume to persist across reboots? But I digress.
Anyway, I want to reverse proxy arbitrary IP traffic, not just HTTP/S Is that possible? If so, how?
My initial naive assumption is that you set up a VPN tunnel between the VPS and the various proxmox containers, with the local containers initiating the connection so port forwarding isn’t necessary. You then set up the reverse proxy on the VPS to funnel traffic through the tunnel to the correct self-hosted container based on domain name and/or port.
Nginx, Traefik, Caddy, HAProxy…lots of options.
Nginx and Traefik are probably the most complex if you’re not familiar with either.
HAProxy is dead simple if you solely intend to just use it as a reverse proxy.
Caddy is fairly simple as well, but slightly more complex than HAP.
If you’re not familiar with routing and VPNs in general, you may want to have a look at Tailscale or ZeroTier which use Wireguard under the hood, but making the routing dead simple, especially if you’re behind a NAT and don’t want to have to mess with ports forwarding.