I’ve often seen remarks that exposing Unraid to the internet isn’t recommended because of security issues but no details. I’m currently hosting my commercial Wordpress website on Namecheap but considering self-hosting using a Cloudflare, nginx, Wordpress stack in order to save a little money (the website doesn’t generate much in the way of direct sales).

Searching Google showed a few threads with questions but no answers so I figured I’d bring up the subject again. Is there a legit security issue? What is it?

Edited May 18May 18 by wgstarks

6 minutes ago, wgstarks said:

Is there a legit security issue

The issue is that the Unraid GUI is not hardened against a serious internet attack, and thus should not be directly exposed to the internet. If you want to access it from the internet do it using either a VPN or Unraid Connect.

33 minutes ago, itimpi said:

The issue is that the Unraid GUI is not hardened against a serious internet attack, and thus should not be directly exposed to the internet. If you want to access it from the internet do it using either a VPN or Unraid Connect.

Thanks. So exposing a website (not the GUI) won’t be an issue as long as it’s done through Cloudflare and a proxy manager?

You would want to host it by using SWAG or similar or even in a VM to further isolate it from unraid

4 minutes ago, MowMdown said:

You would want to host it by using SWAG or similar or even in a VM to further isolate it from unraid

Isn’t SWAG accomplishing the same thing as Cloudflare? I’ve never used it so maybe I’m wrong but I’ve already got Cloudflare setup to access my OpenVPN server on my home router.

19 hours ago, wgstarks said:

Isn’t SWAG accomplishing the same thing as Cloudflare? I’ve never used it so maybe I’m wrong but I’ve already got Cloudflare setup to access my OpenVPN server on my home router.

No. SWAG is Nginx Proxy/Webserver + Fail2Ban + LetsEncrypt rolling into a single application. Cloudflare is a CDN+DNS provider who has some small reverse-proxy like features like CF Tunnels. However you have no local control over it.

You need Nginx to host a webserver from your machine.

Edited May 19May 19 by MowMdown

I was planning on Cloudflare for DNS and LE certs since I already have my dynamic DNS setup there and NGINX proxy manager.

Can SWAG manage dynamic IPs? Or maybe SWAG would just replace NGINX proxy manager in the stack?

Just now, wgstarks said:

I was planning on Cloudflare for DNS and LE certs since I already have my dynamic DNS setup there and NGINX proxy manager.

Can SWAG manage dynamic IPs? Or maybe SWAG would just replace NGINX proxy manager in the stack?

SWAG is the equivalent of Nginx Proxy Manager but more sophisticated than NPM and no GUI.

35 minutes ago, MowMdown said:

SWAG is the equivalent of Nginx Proxy Manager but more sophisticated than NPM and no GUI.

I think I understand now. I would let Cloudflare continue to provide DNS and install SWAG and Wordpress dockers on Unraid to host the website?

I found a SpaceInvaderOne video.

Hopefully it’s not outdated.

Yes