2025-12-24

Wildcard Subdomains

sysadmin

I currently have a number of small utilities that I want to expose publically and I think the best way is to set up tailescale, a public vps and subdomains for each project.

This document is a description of how I'm designing the infrastucture.

Home Server - This has various applications running on various ports.

Public VPS - This has nginx reverse proxying things to my home server

Tailscale - The home server and the public server are part of the same tailnet

Domain Registrar - I have a wildcard set up so *.example.org all point to my public VPS

Certbot - I generate SSL certificates for each subdomain that I need

The certbot command is:

certbot --nginx --expand -d new-subdomain.example.org

The nginx configuration is:

server {
    server_name new-subdomain.example.org;
    
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://tailscale.ip.addr:6666;
        proxy_redirect off;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
    }
}

Once this is done, I can then use my subdomain to access my projects.