So far, my self-hosting has been limited to Pi-Hole, and a static website. I now want to try out something new, an **Immich ** server.
I have a static IP from my ISP, so I don’t need to rent out a VPS. However, given that this IS a home internet, I want to be extra sure that it is going to be secure.
In my existing website, I use Fail2Ban + BadBotBlocker + Anubis + Nginx rate limits to protect it from scrapers, bots and malicious users, and it works well. With photos (especially family photos) at stake, I just want to know more on how to protect my server.
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I can’t recall the name, but there was at least one project that had a kind of static web proxy of shared immich albums, so you can expose that to the internet for sharing and keep Immich its self internal network only.
Put it behind Tailscale/Headscale/Netbird/etc. VPN connection and don’t think about it.
This. You can sync your photos when you’re connected to your home wifi or via tailscale/vpn. You can look at your photos either via vpn or at home in your own network. There is little need for opening it up to the Internet.
Is there a reason it needs to be public facing?
You’re already doing more than companies that charge people to host their photos.
Plain wireguard. Or maybe Pangolin?
I use Pangolin reverse proxy with OAuth (PocketID) for family access to services, along with CrowdSec. For the Immich app access which needs to bypass auth login through the reverse proxy, I use ‘link share’ in Pangolin that gives me header tokens that can be entered in to the Immich app under Advanced settings.
I’ve been an Immich user for over 2 years now, so it’s been a journey for me to implement it to this standard.
Or as someone else suggests, try CloudFlare with something like Google Auth login. Just be aware that you are then exposing all your traffic to Cloudflare. I take that as a small sacrifice for simiplicity.
I would not expose anything to the internet, except if you want to have it public.
I use wireguard as a private, self-hosted VPN. It’s easy to set up.
Despite what some may think, I’m not a representative of Cloudflare, nor do I receive any benefit from recommending them. I just recommend what works for me. There are many avenues at your disposal. That said, Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust is a winner in my book. You will need a cheap domain name that you can change the nameservers to the ones Cloudflare assigns you. After that, you install Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust on your server, and connect to Cloudflare, Jacks a doughnut, Bob’s your uncle. No need to fiddle with NAT, or opening ports. Cloudflare takes care of all of that. Of course you will need port 22 (ssh) to directly admin your server.
I have it behind OAuth.
And then a reverse proxy via NPM.
I don’t know what else to do on it aside from keeping it fully VPNed.
Yeah, maybe it’s because I run public sites on kubernetes at work that I’m not as scared but a good locked down network is fine. Thousands or businesses run public URLs, as long as you configure it right you are mostly good. There is always a risk of vulnerabilities in the software for immich, your proxy, your auth provider so doing it that way increases your attack surface than just the VPN.
Thousands or businesses run public URLs, as long as you configure it right you are mostly good.
Part of “configuring it right” for companies is generally having the public-side be pretty well walled off from anything internal though, there isn’t anything wrong with taking the same approach at home, too
assuming that you’re to expose that to the Internet, my recommendation is to deploy only
- WAF solution, such as https://github.com/corazawaf/coraza-caddy
- bot blocker such as https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/environments/caddy
complicate the setup too much and it’s going to rather be more painful to maintain and also much easier to misconfigure.
The WAF covers OWASP Top 10 so that should give you around 70% protection which is still better than nothing
@Maroon FIY the security verification for my not being a bot failed
I’m sorry, could you rephrase that? I think there are a few typos in your post.
@Maroon no it just wasn’t verifying anything at all, but now it’s fixed. Thanks
