So, I have some idea on what a reverse proxy does and will be using nginx (with the neat proxy manager UI) for my setup.
However, I’m not completely clear what exactly I want it to do and how I cn use it to run different services on one machine. I’m especially unclear on the ports configuration … tutorials will say things like “change the listening port to xxx for that service and to port yyy for the other service”
How does this work, which ports can I use and how do I need to configure the respective services?
EDIT: thanks everybody, your replies did help me a lot! I have my basic setup now up and running using portainer + nginx + fail2ban.
A reverse proxy is a service that takes incoming traffic on an IP address and port. It reads the URL the connection came into and passes it to the service it is configured for.
Example: A server runs Plex. There is a DNS entry plex.myhome.nework that points to the IP of that server. Nginx listens on port 80 and 443. If a client connects to port 80 using plex.myhome.network nginx will pass it to Plex. If it comes in on 443 nginx will still pass it to Plex but it will also provide the configured SSL cert to the client connecting to Plex.
If the server is also running jellyfin and DNS is setup for jellyfin.myhome.network with the same IP. The user connects to jellyfin.myhome.network on port 80 Nginx instead passes it to jellyfin.
So from our example you can see that we have both jellyfin and Plex using the same IP address and port 80.