Just exposed Immich via a remote and reverse proxy using Caddy and tailscale tunnel. I’m securing Immich using OAuth.

I don’t have very nerdy friends so not many people appreciate this.

  • ramenshaman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 days ago

    Can someone ELI5? I’m a noob who aspires to set up immich in the near future. I only recently started making efforts to separate myself from the cloud. So far I’ve got a wireguard server set up and I’ve disconnected both my Bambu printers from the cloud and I’m currently setting up some home assistant stuff. Pretty soon I’m hoping to set up a NAS, Immich, Plex (or similar) and replace my google nest cameras.

    • Nibodhika@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 days ago

      I’ll try to ELI5, if there’s something you don’t understand ask me.

      Op has a home server where he’s running immich, that’s only accessible when he’s at home via the IP, so something like http://192.168.0.3:3000/, so he installed Tailscale on that server. Tailscale is a VPN (Virtual Private Network) that allows you to connect to your stuff remotely, it’s a nice way to do it because it is P2P (peer-to-peer) which means that in theory only he can access that network, whereas if he were using one of the many VPNs people use for other reasons, other people on the same VPN could access his server.

      Ok, so now he can access his immich instance away from home, all he has to do is connect to the VPN on his phone or laptop and he’ll be able to access it with something like http://my_server:3000 since Tailscale adds a DNS (Domain Name System) which resolves the hostnames to whatever IP they have on the Tailscale network.

      But if you want to give your family access it’s hard to explain to them that they need to connect to this VPN, so he rented a VPS (Virtual Private Server) on some company like DigitalOcean or Vultr and connected that machine to the Tailscale network. He probably also got a domain name from somewhere like namecheap, and pointed that domain name to his VPS. Só now he can access his VPS by using ssh user@myserver.com. Now all he needs to do is have something on the VPS which redirects everything that comes to a certain address into the Tailscale machine, Caddy is a nice way to do this, but the more traditional approach is ngnix, so if he puts Caddy on that VPS a config like this:

      immich.myserver.com {
    handle {
        reverse_proxy my_server.tailscale.network.name:3000
    }
}

      Then any requests that come to https://immich.myserver.com/ will get redirected to the home server via Tailscale.

      It is a really nice setup, plus OP also added authentication and some other stuff to make it a bit more secure against attacks directly on immich.

    • randombullet@programming.devOPEnglish
      0·
      3 days ago

      Pretty much I have caddy on a VPS that’s pointing to my internal IP using a tailscale tunnel. You are still exposing the web gui to the Internet so I just changed authentication to OAuth to mitigate since risk. There is still a possibility of attacks via zero days, but my immich is on a VM and I’m creating firewall rules to just allow certain ports out.

      • ramenshaman@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 days ago

        I appreciate the extra details but I still don’t know what “caddy”, “VPS”, “tailscale tunnel”, or “zero days” are, but I can look it up.

        • randombullet@programming.devOPEnglish
          0·
          2 days ago

          It’s hard to explain from scratch.

          Caddy is a reverse proxy software that essentially redirects traffic from a certain port to another port. For example external:port => internal:port. It also enables SSL encryption meaning everything will be encrypted en route between the external and the user.

          VPS is a virtual private server. Just someone else’s computer you can expose to the Internet.

          Tailscale is a mesh VPN that uses wire guard as its transport. I use this to tunnel between my VPS and my Immich server to hide my home IP and to allow encrypted traffic between my Immich server and my VPS.

          A zero-day (also known as a 0-day) is a vulnerability in software or hardware that is typically unknown to the vendor and for which no patch or other fix is available. The vendor thus has zero days to prepare a patch, as the vulnerability has already been described or exploited.

          There’s no fix other than security through layers.