nginx

Nginx is a reverse proxy server. It is used to redirect requests from the public Internet to internal locations on the server’s network (i.e. presque-gamma). Requests from the Internet first go to the router on either ports 80 (http) or 443 (https/ssl). The router directs that traffic to presque-gamma, which has those ports exposed. Nginx, running on presque-gamma, then redirects the traffic to other locations/IPs on the internal network.

We use a version of nginx running on Docker called Nginx Proxy Manager, which is just a front-end GUI for Nginx and makes it much easier to manage. It also manages redirects, 404s, and SSL certificates so our sites can be served over https.

To access all the proxy hosts, you can visit nginx.presquelabs.com

Domain

The presquelabs.com domain is hosted on Google Domains. The administrator of the domain name is presquelabs@gmail.com

DNS

Our DNS provider is Cloudflare, which allows you to assign a domain name and point the domain name towards the public-facing IP address where the server resides. The administrator for our Cloudflare account is presquelabs@gmail.com.

SSL

Our SSL certificates were generated by Let’s Encrypt, which allows you to create a wildcard certificate for all your subdomains (*.presquelabs.com) for free. Instructions for creating wildcard certificates can be found here, but since the wildcard certificates are already generated, they can just be reused. The certificate and key files can be found on Gamma - they do have to be renewed once a year.

Unfortunately the wildcard certificate does not apply to the base domain, presquelabs.com, so that certificate and associated public/private key was generated by a free service, ZeroSSL. The administrator for zeroSSL is presquelabs@gmail.com