first your questions

Is the tunnel solution appropriate for jellyfin?

Yes but also no. the tldr is It will work, but video streaming is against CloudFlare rules. I ran this way for about 2 years with Plex just for my own use, so for about 15 hours a week on 480p and I never got my service suspended, but I’ve heard stories of others getting suspended… So just know it’s a risk

I suppose it’s OK for vaultwarden as there isnt much data being transfered?

That’s a good use of tunnels

Would it be better to run nginx proxy manager for everything or can I run both of the solutions?

You can definitely run both solutions (tunnel points to npm, npm towards to all other services), and it saves you setting up tunnels for each service

Now for my 2 cents

As others have suggested, tailscale funnel is a valid option. A reverse proxy using a VPS is also a valid option. And as I pointed out, doing the CloudFlare tunnel is an option if you’re willing to accept the risk.

My current setup is using a free Oracle VPS with a small nginx docker container forwarding all port 80 and 443 traffic through a tailscale. On the other end is a nginx proxy manager docker container that points to all my services across the network. I have my CloudFlare details configured in nginx proxy manager to generate a wildcard SSL certificate that I apply to all my local services

Inside the network, I use adguard to redirect the domain to the local LAN IP of the nginx proxy manager server to avoid traffic going through the internet.

Then all you need to do is point the domain on CloudFlare dns to the Oracle server, and you’ll have several layers of separation between the internet and your local LAN , as well as SSL certs both internally and externally on any services you share

It might not be the most elegant setup, but I share my Plex server (as well as about 30 other things) with several other people and can handle multiple 1080p streams going through it without any issue and it’s been nice and stable for over a year without any issues

I’m definitely not a network pro, but it sounds like you’re looking to do something similar to what I have.

I’ve got nginx proxy manager as my reverse proxy with pi-hole for local DNS. All traffic goes through the pi-hole and anything going to mydomain.com has DNS entries pointing to nginx. I’ve set nginx up so service.lan.mydomain.com is for anything local and just service.mydomain.com for anything external with wildcard SSL certs for both (*.domain doesn’t seem to cover *.lan.domain so add certs for both - probably because it’s a sub-subdomain).

The Cloudflare tunnel can then just get directed to service.mydomain.com instead of the IP of the service.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

9 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 20 acronyms.

[Thread #894 for this sub, first seen 29th Jul 2024, 05:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

I haven’t deployed Cloudflare but I’ve deployed Tailscale, which has many similarities to the CF tunnel.

• Is the tunnel solution appropriate for Jellyfin?

I assume you’re talking about speed/performance here. The overhead added by establishing the connection is mostly just once at the connection phase, and it’s not much. In the case of Tailscale there’s additional wireguard encryption overhead for active connections, but it remains fast enough for high-bandwidth video streams. (I download torrents over wireguard, and they download much faster than realtime.) Cloudflare’s solution is only adding encryption in the form of TLS to their edge. Everything these days uses TLS, you don’t have to sweat that performance-wise.

(You might want to sweat a little over the fact that cloudflare terminates TLS itself, meaning your data is transiting its network without encryption. Depending on your use case that might be okay.)

• I suppose it’s OK for vaultwarden as there isnt much data being transfered?

Performance wise, vaultwarden won’t care at all. But please note the above caveat about cloudflare and be sure you really want your vaultwarden TLS terminated by Cloudflare.

• Would it be better to run nginx proxy manager for everything or can I run both of the solutions?

There’s no conflict between the two technologies. A reverse proxy like nginx or caddy can run quite happily inside your network, fronting all of your homelab applications; this is how I do it, with caddy. Think of a reverse proxy as just a special website that branches out to every other website. With that model in mind, the tunnel is providing access to the reverse proxy, which is providing access to everything else on its own. This is what I’m doing with tailscale and caddy.

• General recs

Consider tailscale? Especially if you’re using vaultwarden from outside your home network. There are ways to set it up like cloudflare, but the usual way is to install tailscale on the devices you are going to use to access your network. Either way it’s fully encrypted in transit through tailscale’s network.

The cloudflare tunnel is effectively a local reverse proxy

Create a docker network, place everything on the same docker network, then you can reach stuff by setting the tunnel at http://[container-name]

So you set the tunnel at http://nextcloud or http://jellyfin:8096 and so on

You’d think “but without a local proxy that does ssl encryption, cloudflare could read my communication” - no, if they really wanted they could read it anyway as they decrypt and reencrypt

This all sounds like too many levels of hair. If you really want to serve from home and have the upstream bandwidth for it, then reverse proxy to a cheap VPS seems like the easiest approach. I lost interest in that ages ago, partly because of crappy home internet. I have played with the idea of colo’ing a server at a data center but in the end, it’s simpler to use VPS and/or rental dedicated servers, so I do that instead. Whether that counts as self hosting is up to you, I guess.

AFAIK, Tailscale has Funnel, which is better than CF tunnels since you can expose any machine you have without buying an expensive switch.

I use Nextcloud with Nginx Proxy Manager and just use NPM to handle the reverse proxy, nothing in Nextcloud other than adding the domain to the config so it’s trusted.

I use Plex instead of Jellyfin, but I stream it through NPM with no issues. I can’t speak to the tunnel though, I prefer a simple wireguard tunnel for anything external so I’ve never tried it.

Edit: unless that’s what you mean by tunnel, I was assuming you meant traefik or tailscale or one of the other solutions I see posted more often, but I think one or both of those use wireguard under the hood.

if your service has to be public i would recommend getting a switch that can do VLANs and put your server inside it’s own VLAN DMZ so if you get hacked they will be trapped inside the VLAN

remote.it