Docker, Tailscale, and Caddy, oh my

I do my web development on a server under my desk, and the way I had it set up is with a wildcard entry set up for *.muck.rawm.us so requests would hit nginx on that server which was configured to handle various incarnations of whatever I was working on. The IP address was originally just a private-network one, and eventually I migrated that to a Tailscale tailnet address. Still published to public DNS, but not a big deal since those weren’t routable.

A reason I liked this is because I find it easier to deal with hostnames like talapoin.muck.rawm.us and scat.muck.rawm.us rather than running things on different ports and trying to keep those straight.

One annoyance was that I had to maintain an active SSL certificate for the wildcard. Not a big deal, and I had that nearly automated, but a bigger hassle was that whenever I wanted to set up another service it required mucking about in the nginx configuration.

Something I have wanted to play around with for a while was using Tailscale with Docker to make each container (or docker-compose setup, really) it’s own host on my tailnet.

So I finally buckled down, watched this video deep dive into using Tailscale with Docker, and got it all working.

I even took on the additional complication of throwing Caddy into the mix. That ended up being really straightforward once I finally wrapped my head around how to set up the file paths so Caddy could serve up the static files and pass the PHP off to the php-fpm container. Almost too easy, which is probably why it took me so long.

Now I can just start this up, it’s accessible at talapoin.{tailnet}.ts.net, and I can keep on tinkering.

While it works the way I have it set up for development, it will need tweaking for “production” use since I won’t need Tailscale.