Timeout when accessing NPM from outside host

[Edgar_Duenez-Guzman]

Please use this template for troubleshooting questions.

My issue:

Hello,

TL;DR NPM works fine when accessing HTTPS website locally, but not from any external source.

How I encountered the problem:

I’ve been struggling to get NPM to properly forward connections to my server. I’m setting up an Open-WebUI server with Nginx reverse proxy for HTTPS/SSL access. I can get the docker Nginx and Open-WebUI images to load correctly. I am using DuckDNS as my DNS (at least for now), but I am running into a problem where I can access Open-WebUI using the DNS address from the browser, but only when doing it from the machine that is running Nginx and Open-WebUI. No other machine can see the server, even though nmap shows the 443 port as filtered for https.

I am running both Nginx and Open-WebUI in a Mac with apple silicon, and disabling the firewall doesn’t solve the problem. I’ve tried the steps in https://docs.openwebui.com/tutorials/https-nginx both for Let’s Encrypt and for self-signed to no avail. I am guessing there is something very stupid that I’m missing or that it’s a particular quirk of macs.

Solutions I’ve tried:

Things I’ve tried:

• Port forwarding port 81 → I can see the Nginx login console just fine using my domain :81 (so I know it is not that Nginx is not reachable)

• Port forwarding port 3000 → I can see the OpenWebUI login console just fine using my my domain :3000 (so I know it is not the end server rejecting the connection)

• curl -v https://my_domain returns something when run from the host machine, but fails from an external machine.

The error is:

connect to XX port 443 from YY port 65527 failed: Operation timed out
Failed to connect to my_domain port 443 after 75558 ms: Couldn't connect to server
Closing connection
curl: (28) Failed to connect to my_domain port 443 after 75558 ms: Couldn't connect to server

It seems to me that Nginx is refusing to forward the connection because something is telling it that the source is wrong whenever it is starting outside of the host, but I cannot figure out why. Any help would be much appreciated.

TIA!

Version of NGINX or NGINX adjacent software (e.g. NGINX Gateway Fabric): v2.12.6

Deployment environment: Mac Studio

Minimal NGINX config to reproduce your issue (preferably running on https://tech-playground.com/playgrounds/nginx for ease of debugging, and if not as a code block): (Tip → Run nginx -T to print your entire NGINX config to your terminal.)

NGINX access/error log: (Tip → You can usually find the logs in the /var/log/nginx directory.)

[alessandro]

Hi @Edgar_Duenez-Guzman! It seems as if you are using NGINX Proxy Manager right? That is not a tool developed or supported by us, so I would suggest asking in their GitHub discussions Hopefully someone else in this forum has some experience using NGINX Proxy Manager and can help you out too!

[Edgar_Duenez-Guzman]

Thanks! I’ll do that.

[alessandro]

I would also suggest potentially getting replacing NGINX Proxy Manager with vanilla NGINX instead – a cursory search shows the main advantage of NPM is that it supports automatic cert renewals, and coincidentally, we just launched an NGINX OSS module that supports this use case.