Nginx manager. Surprisingly simple. You change your letsencrypt to contain yourdomain.com and *.yourdomain.com and voila.

You want a reverse proxy. A reverse proxy reads requests to subdomains and then forwards them to ports and back.

The easiest GUI one is: https://nginxproxymanager.com/

But there is also just straight nginx, or you can use Caddy or traefik or anything else.

What is the absolute simplest way to accomplish this?

< gets on soap box>

The absolute simplest way is to use IPv6: on your Debian machine, assign multiple IPv6 addresses, one for each service you want to expose to your LAN. There’s no penalty with having a dozen v6 addresses.

Although you have those addresses, your machine generally uses just a single one for its own outbound and inbound traffic. For each service, you would edit their config so that they bind to a specific IPv6 address. Finally, you would configure an AAAA entry in DNS so that your chosen subdomain will point to the IPv6 address in question.

As an example, suppose you had three different web servers running Nginx, currently on port 80, 8081, and 42069. What you would change is the server config for each server instance, adidng the IPv6 address as part of the “listen” directive. Since each instance is now bound to a different IP address, nginx can now listen to the conventional port 80 and n’ary will the three collide. In other software, the configuration option you’re looking for is the “bind address”.

For a home network, you might have a single /64 IPv6 subnet. But that still means you literally have billions upon billions of addresses to use before you ever run out. And as you’ve recognized, using DNS names to identify services is a lot easier and intuitive than using port numbers. It also neatly avoids the need to memorize IPv6 addresses, because that’s never been necessary: we have DNS.

< gets off soap box>

Nginx proxy manager is the easy way. Spin it up and the UI is fairly straight forward. You can also achieve the same thing with nginx or caddy, but you’ll have to set up the configs by hand.

https://nginxproxymanager.com/

You just need a reverse proxy

In OpenWRT, add an entry in DNSmasq under General - Addresses of /myfakecomain.com/<serverIPAddress This will make every variation of service.myfakedomain.com resolve to that address (assuming you have the hosts on your network obtaining DNS via the OpenWRT router).

Then set up a reverse proxy on that server or whereever you’re directing that wildcard. If you have a lot of docker stacks on that machine, I’d suggest Traefik because you can just configure the compose files with the hostnames you want for that service, and it’ll update Traefik to redirect that hostname to that container. You can also add bespoke entries to Traefik for non-container services, or other services on your network to redirect towards.

I have that exact setup. Let’s suppose you want to use layzer.lan as your domain. The way I did it:

1. Make a DNS record that maps *.layzer.lan to your private IP. You can do this by either manually editing your local DNS resolver config file, or hosting a DNS server and adding a a new entry. I did the later, and chose AdGuard for that.

2. Use a reverse proxy. I use nginx-proxy-manager, and added a proxy host for each service you want to access with the link. For example, for my Immich server that is running in port 30041, I added a proxy host such that immich.layzer.lan takes you to http://192.168.0.10:30041/. Ports 80 and 443 have to be free for nginx to take. You can also add https support from here, and it’s very easy to do if you have bough a real domain.

Web browsers look for either port :80 or port :443 by default, your reverse proxy sits on those ports, hence why you don’t need to input a port at the end of the domain.

Get yourself a load balancer like Traefik or SWAG, buy a domain, setup ACME certificates for SSL/TLS and start pointing your load balancer to your services.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:

[Thread #52 for this comm, first seen 12th Jul 2026, 06:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

https://doc.traefik.io/traefik/ if you dockering

i use with openwrt DNS Forwarding to create a wilcard domain (eg service1.nbsp.lan, service2.nbsp.lan etc), then when i vpn in all my services just work ™️… kinda

Read up on the host header, any http server can parse that. Set up DNS resolver and the http server does the rest. If you already serve from a reverse proxy, just change the port setup to a host header based setup. The term to search for is vhost config.

The simplest (= most basic) solution would be to assign several IPs to the machine (you can add multiple on the same network interface) and have each service listen on a specific address.

Use Caddy on each device, with tls turned off. Basically

http://service1.devicename.lan/ {
    tls off
    reverse_proxy localhost:8000
}
http://service2.devicename.lan/ {
    tls off
    reverse_proxy localhost:8096
}

If all your services support binding to a unix socket, I’d bind them to /run/<servicename>.sock or similar, and set up a reverse proxy that hits /run/$servicename.sock when serving $servicename.devicename.lan. If the service can’t bind to a unix socket, you can probably socat it or similar, and keep using the generic reverse proxy. Then, all your router has to do is route port 80 to your Debian machine.

If they’re just internal the simplest way is to add another IP on the same interface to whatever is serving your service, then bind the service to that IP and add the entry in DNS.

If for some reason you want to keep everything hosted on one IP, for a reverse proxy, caddy is pretty simple. An example caddyfile would be:

http://service1.devicename.lan/ { 
    reverse_proxy 1.2.3.4:9005
}

http://service2.devicename.lan/ { 
    reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:1234
}

This would also allow you to set https in the future using ACME (dns method if internal only) or your own CA / custom cert.