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.
So a reverse proxy is sort of like a phonebook or directory, it routes outside requests to the appropriate place. So imagine your reverse proxy is a receptionist, someone comes in and says “hey I am looking for plex.mydomain.com” the receptionist would then use the phonebook and say “ok if you are looking for plex.mydomain.com, go to building 192.168.1.10 (the ip), room 9000 (the port)”
Since you are asking about dockerized services, the networking for those can be done in several different ways, but the one thing that really matters is that each service needs to have a unique combination of ip and port, because only 1 service can live at each address. With docker, you could set up multiple services that use the host server’s ip, in which case each container will need to be on different ports, or you could have it so each container has its own ip, in which case the port can be anything.