Domains in a home network

[basil (Basil Hendroff)]

Let’s say you want to access services locally, but not from outside the network. Is there still a requirement to have a valid domain name? Could you use any domain name e.g. domain.lan that would be configured in the local DNS.

This might be useful if you want to use Caddy so you don’t have to remember non-intuitive port numbers like 8181. A Caddy block might look like:

rslsync.domain.lan {
    reverse_proxy 192.168.250.11:8888
}

[francislavoie]

Yes, you can use any domain you like.

But note the Automatic HTTPS activation rules:

Automatic HTTPS - Caddy Documentation

If your domain “looks” like it could be public (see “Hostname requirements”) then Caddy will attempt to fetch a cert from a public issuer (Let’s Encrypt/ZeroSSL) unless you tell it not to, by either using HTTP explicitly (prefixing the site address with http://) or forcing use of Caddy’s local CA (with tls internal directive, or local_certs global option).

[basil (Basil Hendroff)]

So in the example I quoted, I should do the following to inhibit HTTPS activation rules?

http://rslsync.domain.lan {
    reverse_proxy 192.168.250.11:8888
}

[matt (Matt Holt)]

Yeah, that’s how I’d do it.

You could alternatively specify the HTTP port (like rslsync.domain.lan:80, since it defies convention to serve HTTPS on port 80, so Caddy won’t do it). Or turn automatic HTTPS off entirely using the global options (not recommended).