So, while this is not exactly a typical "self-hosting" question as many users might not be using domains, I would be curious if anyone else has any experience with this.
I have NGinx Proxy Manager installed on a vps and a few docker instances that host various services (wordpress, a gitlab, etc etc) that I have bound to specific ports (wordpress to port 80, gitlab to port 3000, to give made up arbitrary examples.)
I also have a domain and a few subdomains registered as Type A resource records that look like:
[www.]somedomain[.com]
[gitlab.]somedomain[.com]
The essence of the question: When I go to NGinx Proxy Manager and register a "Proxy Host" for the gitlab subdomain, like:
Domain: gitlab.somedomain.com
Scheme: http
Forward Hostname: <IP ADDRESS HERE>
Forward Port: 3000 (AKA the port gitlab is hosted on)
This works, but it comes with the drawback that the port number is then exposed in the url bar like so:
gitlab.somedomain.com:3000
So is there some way to fix this on the NGINX proxy manager side of things? Or is this a case where I'm doing this completely wrong and someone with web-dev experience can help me see the light. While it's not a huge hindrance to my use-case, it would still be nice to understand how this is supposed to work so that I can host more services myself that require domain names without having to shell out for isolated IPs. So if I hosted a lemmy or kbin, for example, I could actually configure it to use my subdomains correctly.
So for example nginx 'sees' the request for gitlab.website.www or game.website.www and forwards it to either the gitlab docker or the game (whatever that service might be)?
I had a hard time to configure nginx for dockerized Lemmy (as I started out from scratch), your explanation makes it make so much sense now :-) !
You got it! As long as nginx can reach that service container, it will forward the request to it.
service1.example.com is configured in nginx with a proxy host of service1:1234, service2.example.com is proxied to service2:8080 and so on.
Thanks!