Hello, I’ve been looking at many guides but I’m having trouble understanding how to selfhost VaultWarden locally. Could someone help me understand how I could achieve this considering,
- I don’t have a domain
- It would be nice to do something like vaultwarden.local or vaultwarden.homelab.local instead of typing in the homelab’s pc static ip and the port vaultwarden is on
- I don’t want to expose anything outside of my local network
- Security reasons
- I am now well versed in networking so I don’t want to risk leaving an entry point for unwanted users or hackers
I also learned that I would need to sign certificates to be able to access it on some browsers and the additional security. I learned that Traefik offers self-signed certificates, but every video I have seen starts talking about needing a domain and cloudflare tunneling and I get lost.
It would be nice if I could get help or advice from the r/selfhosted community because I am new to all of this but want to learn and host more applications and services locally. Thank you.
DuckDNS provides you with xxx.duckdns.org for free and gives you ability to generate wildcard certificates. What I suggest you do is
1a) host VW locally only 1b) host it so that is accessible only with VPN.
2. In duckdns set ip to you local ip that VW is being hosted on (ie 192.168.1.20) or vpn ip
2. Use Traefik or NPM (or any other reverse proxy) to generate wildcard certificate with dns challange
3. Use Traefik or NPM to point on your device to the port VW is accessible on
If you never set up Traefik I suggest you use Nginx Proxy Manager, it’s waaaay easier to set up, especially if you don’t need the flexibility of Traefik.
I tried npm and it’s good for simple things…however with anything complex you actually have to know nginx pretty well which at that point I’d just use the swag container. I agree traefik is much more complex to learn initially…like I struggled for days until like finally a lighbulb went on and I kind of figured it out. It would be tough to start out with traefik without some background configuring a different reverse proxy. A lot of users sware by caddy so to its ease of use but then again it doesn’t provide a gui. I do really enjoy traefiks dashboard as to verify the configuration is set appropriately however