Many services and devices in our home lab have web interfaces. We secure many of them using Nginx Proxy Manager as a reverse proxy.

Traefik Reverse Proxy provides ingress control and SSL certificates for our docker services. While Traefik can be used for services outside Docker, configuring it is complex and requires restarting the Trafik container. As a result, we also run Nginx PM in a container to enable SSL certificates and simple reverse proxy configuration of our web-based services outside of Docker.

Nginx Proxy Manager Installation

Installing is easy. The following video explains the process, including using a DNS-01 challenge to obtain SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt.

We configured a Docker macVLAN network for the Nginx PM container so that the proxy could determine the source IP addresses that access it. This enables IP filtering and other features.