Stick with it, sounds like you’ve got a system that works for you

Currently I don’t have an auth service sitting in front of my other services, it’s just whatever auth is built into each app and saved passwords.

That said, I’ve deployed Authentik at a workplace and really enjoyed working with it, using it for SSO for a variety of services. I’ll implement it on my own platform soon.

Here’s how I solved the problem: https://blog.lchapman.dev/self-hosting-foundations/

Not free, but pretty cheap. Been doing it for a year or so and I’m happy with the solution.

Here’s how I do it: https://blog.lchapman.dev/self-hosting-foundations/

Note: blog isn’t monetised, I just write things up to make them easier to share with people.

Basically, I use a cloud VM as a gateway and reverse proxy to my services which are accessible via VPN. It’s not free, but it’s pretty cheap.

I have a friend who is using Cloudflare for this. He has a domain and he can access his services at domain.tld:port. Not bad, and it’s free. He could have his tunnel pointed at Caddy like I do and use subdomains, but he hasn’t got that far yet.

I prefer my method but both seem to get the basic functionality working.

Caddy takes almost all of the nginx boilerplate and handles it for you.

If you’re doing something simple in nginx, it’s far simpler with Caddy.