Create Records to Point to your Home Server on Cloudflare Using Nginx Progy Manager

Please refer to the "Setup your Domain with Cloudflare" page before getting started here.

This works best for those who have either a static IP address or a long lease. We have Verizon FioS and have never seen our WAN IP change and we do not pay for a static IP. Maybe we are just lucky. But either way, I will set this up so if our IP does change, all we have to do is change one record for all the rest to follow suite.

We will be using Nginx Proxy Manager for keeping track of our hosts and SSL certificates. I found it is the most user friendly application for this purpose. More specifically, I use the jlesage/docker-nginx-proxy-manager docker image.

Before we begin

It's best to run Nginx Proxy Manager on a dedicated machine, VM, container or the likes. This way we have access to port 80 and 443 on the machine. and we won't have any conflicts with ports. Port 80 and 443 are the ONLY ports we have to expose on our router to get this setup and working. This allows us to create more services on our network and expose them to the internet WITHOUT opening more ports for those services to be accessed remotely. Pretty rad isn't it?

I run Nginx Proxy Manager on a LXC container in Proxmox but I won't be discussing that aspect of the setup.

Creating the Docker container

Begin by executing the following compose command. I use Portianer for easier management, but you can just as easily toss the compose file on your machine and run a docker-compose up -d.

docker run -d \
    --name=nginx-proxy-manager \
    -p 8181:8181 \
    -p 80:8080 \
    -p 443:4443 \
    -v /docker/appdata/nginx-proxy-manager:/config:rw \
    jlesage/nginx-proxy-manager