Building an intranet with nginx?

Projects NGINX
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1

I’m sorry but I’m not using the template. I am here to ask a relatively open-ended question.

Okay so here is the concept: I have a VPS with wireguard that allows P2P traffic and is running pihole as a DNS and DHCP solution. I want to be able to connect to wireguard and use that tunnel to access the “localhost” servers I have running on my local machine at home (like a wireguard “road warrior” setup. The difference between my goals here and a traditional “road warrior” setup is that I want to take it a few steps further and A) map each relevant port to a static URI (ie I want to be able to reach 127.0.0.1#1337 at example.private/server or server.example.private) and B) allow individual peers to interact (chat room, etc)

I’m not asking for anyone to do the work for me I just would really like to get some feedback and pointers on this. I feel like I’m spinning my wheels and just wondering what is the most efficient way to get this project off the ground the rest of the way. Currently I have pihole working and was able to add a local domain record for example.private and that works great for my VPS but getting my local machine to behave the same hasn’t been fruitful. I’m going to crosspost this to the pihole discourse, but I wanted to ask here because I was under the impression that nginx would be the best solution for this… :confused:

Any constructive feedback or discourse would be very much appreciated!

2

In terms of nginx, you can create multiple server blocks each with their own listen ip:port pairs…

But couldn’t you just do good old name based virtual hosting ? (Assuming you can create suitable DNS records)

3

That’s a really good point! Do you think I should use apache for that or is that something nginx or pihole might be able to accomplish? In pihole I can set local DNS records, reverse DNS servers, and DHCP leases and static per-host parameters.

Not entirely certain what that last one means lol I don’t know much about DHCP. I do have the DHCP server enabled, though and with a basic configuration for the private subnet.

Also - with my current setup I am able to resolve example.private: but I wanted to hide the port in the URI and instead have it represented by a subdomain. Looking into Name-Based Virtual Hosting I see that it would work great for this except for one thing that I’m not sure how to deal with - all the info I see on this indicates I would have to specify a document root but the docker containers I am using already have their own webpages/websockets. I’m wondering if there’s a way I could get it to play nice with docker…

Thank you!