Remotely access and share your self-hosted services

We're going to use Tailscale and the reverse proxy Caddy to share self-hosted services on your Tailnet with friends and family.

In today's video we focus on Immich - a self-hosted photo backup tool, Audiobookshelf - an audiobook server, and Jellyfin - an open source media server.

Choose your own adventure in today's video and use it as a resource to share with friends or relatives who you'd like to be access your services. If you're looking for the chapter to send your remote users to, it's at 10:44 "instructions for remote users".

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00:00 - Start
01:55 - What are we deploying then?
03:34 - Configuring Caddy (the reverse proxy)
06:33 - Configuring DNS
08:34 - A solution recap
09:55 - Generating an invite link
10:44 - Instructions for remote users
12:57 - Accepting the invite link
15:33 - Setting up a mobile device

[Tailscale]

Note that in some circumstances, certain Operating Systems (Windows and Android) might not resolve these CNAMEs correctly. See this ongoing GitHub issue for more information if you run into issues.

[robby_barnes]

I really appreciate the way you explain things. You do such a great job of explaining these things in a way that gives detail in a way that makes sense to people with a range of technical detail. I have a pretty strong technical background but it still bothers me when companies do the whole “step 1, draw some circles. Step 2, draw the rest of the owl” kind of tutorials. There aren’t enough people on the internet with positive feedback so I wanted to make sure to take a moment for it on this. Please keep these coming and keep up the good work, I for one really appreciate it.

[julianhamann]

Setting a CNAME record in Cloudflare to an FQDN on the tailnet felt like a switch in my brain just clicked and everything made sense.

[gljames]

This is perfect! I was just about to do this with immich, tailscale, and a reverse proxy, but I had no idea how to set it up. It's like this video was explicitly made for me!

[menonrb]

This concept just suddenly became clear. Thank you for the instructions on how to do this. Was unhappy exposing certain services to the entire internet, but this video has clarified how this can be avoided. Nicely done.

[valterschmaltz]

I use to have cloudflare as my DNS server. Now I host my own technitium DNS server, and I configured tailscale to enforce that as the DNS server. In technitium I am using the split dns app, which allows me resolving to both tailscale and my lan IPs, depending where the client is connecting from. Works great.

[pmvim]

Hey! Idk what’s more awesome at this point, your content or your product. Mad kudos! Thank you so much!!

[ghangj]

Another BANGER from Alex. It is always a great time to learn more about Tailscale.

[alexclifford]

Brilliant. I've used tailscale for a family jellyfin server for our movies and shows, image syncing with photosync so it syncs my photos and videos from my phone to my hard drive from anywhere. Then I have a mini pc with a big 12TB hard drive connected with tailscale for personal cloud storage, accessible from any device. I use CX file explorer from my android phone and tablet to access my files on it.

It has an upfront outlay but much much cheaper than any cloud storage (and larger). Plus I've got some other apps I'm experimenting with.

Really brilliant piece of software. I've never come across something so practical and intuitive for networking devices.

[diszydreams]

Thanks Alex, thanks Tailscale! I got into Tailscale from listening to the "Self-Hosted"-Podcast (which I still listen to and enjoy very much!) and have been using it for ~1 year, but using it more like a traditional VPN (host to host, between my home-automation server, my pi-hole rasp. etc.). So as my autumn learning project I have decided to a) do from docker to podman and b) spin up pods, or rather services/apps that are in containers&pods - so that they become accessible on my tailnet, independently of the underlying host. SO just wanted to say that this video was just what I needed ! Have a good one!

[reddeer]

You are one of the best video tutorials makers i have ever seen. Well explained and good amount of detail.

[bikerchrisukk]

Video's like this were very much needed, nice one 👍

Really pleased to see Immich getting more attention - I haven't had a successful install using TrueNAS Scale, but I'm definitely keen to try it again very soon.

Just about domains, but here in the UK I found OVH, super cheap. I've only used it for a casual use, but the ovh domain itself is very cheap.

...and after years of listening to Alex's podcasts, funny to actually see what he looks like!

[CloudCraftsman-hv]

As I listened to you describe a reverse proxy (I've also struggled with how to think of them).
I just had the thought.
A normal proxy is where you go from one to many (think a system behind a proxy server that goes to many web sites or services).
Which makes it simple to think of its reverse as going from many to one (think of many remote end users hitting a service behind a proxy).
Doesn't really matter how the underlying tech makes that work, if you just think of it this way.

[morandy]

Your videos are very helpful. I think I might be able to route my selfhosted services to Tailscale with the help of this video and your docker guides :)
Thanks again!

[TheVoidOfWhatever]

You know, I just see Alex on the screen and I click the like button, simple as...

[amosgiture]

I always learn something new with Sir Alex. Thanks!

[Aiall-dy]

Alex! to my knowledge, every person is asking about caddy configuration thing, which is ofcourse unclear to us all and not able to accomplish what is demonstrated in the video

[IonyDFT]

Can't tell you how much I love tailscale!

[rafraf]

Great video! It would be great if you could do a tutorial for Tailscale ACLs

[seth]

There are good vides and there are great ones!
And then, there is this!
Great work Alex, keep raising that👙bar!