nginx-proxy becomes almost a must have if you have multiple services and prefer remembering domain names instead of port numbers https://github.com/nginx-proxy/nginx-proxy
Home labbing today has a lot of amazing software and it's hard to keep up!
And as for dashboarding [5] on top of all this there are a lot of options.
Also, for those new to the game who want an easier way to approach take a look at Tipi [6].
[0] https://nginxproxymanager.com/ [1] https://traefik.io/traefik/ [2] https://tailscale.com [3] https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-one/connections... [4] https://smallstep.com/blog/build-a-tiny-ca-with-raspberry-pi... [5] https://selfh.st/apps/?tag=Dashboard [6] https://runtipi.io/
I've been running a Tailscale container, using the `tailscale serve` feature[0], as a sidecar for each containerized service I want to access. External access, TLS (to make my browser happy), and domain names all come for almost free. This allows me to set up `https://my-cool-service.lemur-pangolin.ts.net` with relative ease.
There's a ton of boilerplate, which drives me a bit nuts. But at least copy/paste is easy to do. Looking just now I have 31 Tailscale containers running that are almost duplicates of each other. You could probably do config generation but for a homelab I'm not motivated to really do that.
The command line interface for this tool is a little bit limited and forces you to share the network stack between your service and the sidecar. I would recommend injecting a config file into each container to give you full flexibility. I put up an example config on pastebin[1].
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For those with a multi-machine setup, like running the easy stuff on a 1L machine and having backupservice at multiple locations or the LLMs on a big setup that might even use WakeOnLan the proxy will keep you from having to remember the IPs as well.