Haven't used cloud flare tunnel, but is it basically like a dydns provider with cloud flare security?
Does it have it's own domain or is url some crazy hash looking string
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Haven't used cloud flare tunnel, but is it basically like a dydns provider with cloud flare security?
Does it have it's own domain or is url some crazy hash looking string
[...] is it basically like a dydns provider with cloud flare security?
It's similar but with dyndns clients are connected directly to your own IP address (which may occasionally change). Cloudflare Tunnel is what the name implies, a tunnel: you run a process (cloudflared) on your machine that connects to Cloudflare, and clients will connect to Cloudflare as well. Cloudflare does its thing with the connection, then sends it to cloudflared which forwards it to your actual server process.
Benefits compared to dyndns:
Downsides:
Does it have it’s own domain or is url some crazy hash looking string
Cloudflare provides two options: quick tunnels and permanent ones.
Quick tunnels are temporary but quick to set up: you just run cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost, it tells you your URL is something like https://some-words-strung-together.trycloudflare.com, and when you stop cloudflared (or it loses the connection) that URL is gone and you can't get it back.
Permanent tunnels require more configuration, and you need to already own or control a (sub)domain for Cloudflare to manage. Internally it uses a "crazy hash looking string" domain, but that's just for configuration and not really user-visible. The main differences compared to quick tunnels:
yourdomain.com or sub.yourdomain.net or whatever).
Are you able to authenticate locally, bypassing CloudFlare?
OK, so for anyone who might stumble across this in the future; I solved it. Kinda.
Basically, what's happening is that lemmy is using the site URI for the human-readable content and /api for api stuff (including login, loading and a bunch of other stuff).
I tried setting up two sites in the tunnel; one to lemmy.mydomain and one to lemmy.mydomain/api but that didn't seem to work. Presumably due to websocket calls not being re-routed.
What I opted to do was to setup lemmy.mydomain to my Nginx Reverse Proxy (I manage it using Nginx Proxy Manager). From there I added a proxy host pointing to my lemmy ui docker container and created a custom location for /api, pointing to the backend at port 8536.
The result is working great and all functions (that I've tested so far) is working without a hitch! Certificates are automatically managed by Cloudflare and I also get the adde dbenefit that Cloudflare offers on DNS and filtering while allowing access to my lemmy instance.