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.
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You can use a free domain from noip or similar. Then letsencrypt to get a cert, and then firewall/nginx config to prevent external access to vaultwarden?
Your router is exposed to public internet as long as it gets a public ip address. Domain is just an alias of ip easy to remember. Set strong policy on router will protects your local network on most scenarios.
What I did on self hosting is:
- Purchase a domain, add record pointing to my router’s public ip.
- Expose ports for non-sensitive or authentication-capable application on home server. Those apps can be accessed from anywhere using public domain directly in browser.
- Deploy an OpenVPN server on home server, generate SSL certificates, install OpenVPN client and import certificates on my devices. Then set series of policies on router, to let data packets from OpenVPN’s subnet can be routered to home server with certain ports. Whenever a sensitive app or app without login portal need to be accessed (from public internet), just start OpenVPN client at first.
- Make sure some critical apps could only be access from local network, even not for OpenVPN’s subnet, such router’s portal.
If you’re bothered to tweak config on router, you could also use Cloudflare’s tunnel, to manually add second level domain record for each service, if there are not many.
Besides, I use caddy to auto regenerate Let’s Encrypt’s certificate. It default requires that 80 port of you network is accessiable, not blocked by ISP. Or you can use dns verification in Let’s Encrypt’s config, just provide your domain provider’s API credential to it.
https://drfrankenstein.co.uk/2023/05/20/vaultwarden-bitwarden-in-container-manager-on-a-synology-nas/ is a great guide if you have Synology
Use a self signed SSL cert
Use nginx to reverse proxy the vaultwarden instance
Use the hostname.local address to access the device or add a DNS override to your router. If that’s not an option update your hosts file on the machines you intend to use it from.