How I used cloudflare tunnel to serve my self-hosted media server

[fstasi]

Background

• I have a dockerized self-hosted media server (will talk about it in a separate post)
• every docker container has its own ports
• previously I used to reverse proxy the services, placing an ngnix container in front. But this has some major issues:
  • need to open port 80 in my router
  • more attack surface (nginx)
  • some ISPs do not allow opening port 80
  • some ISPs don't have static IPs, requiring an additional mechanism to dynamically update the DNS as the io change (such as dd-clienr)
  • some Italian ISPs run in a subnet, making the server virtually impossible to reach

cloudflare tunnel (cloudflared) to the rescue

Cloudflare tunnel (namely argo tunnel) is effectively a VPN between all the machines it runs on and the cloudlfare network.
It fixes all the above creating a tunnel to the cloudflare network.
Also hides my server IP, as users connect to the cloudflare network that internally routes the traffic to my local server.