App to Reverse Proxy on Synology DSM

by Rian

Synology DSM is equipped with rudimentary level of reverse proxy feature, but after few home lab projects, I believe a user ought to notice the inherent reliability issue. In my setup, I keep my NAS unexposed the to the internet — the only way to access it is via Tailscale or VPN. The problem with the certificates were expected in the old setup; a certificate on DSM is issued on the premise NAS is exposed to the internet with the necessary ports.

Caddy is open-source and freely available reverse proxy software, also available on Docker. The tool offers a lot more than just reverse proxy. In my new setup, not only it is acting as a reverse proxy, it is working in tandem with DuckDNS to solve pesky certificate issue.

I will do more in-depth write up on the Caddy + DuckDNS in the future. Everyone’s build is going to be different, but some principles I had should be rather common places: a. NAS not exposed to the internet, b. certificate issues on the browsers (even though it’s local) c. browsers bouncing back and forth between HTTPS and HTTP with DSM’s included reverse proxy.