General question whether I understood SSL certification correctly

That’s the neat part…

There are a few steps you need to follow:

  1. Issue a valid (preferably wildcard) cert for your domain/subdomain. Sometimes it can be done by the reverse proxy itself. AFAIK, vanilla nginx doesn’t have this functionality built-in.
  2. Specify this cert in reverse proxy configs.
  3. Specify the URLs to your apps in reverse proxy configs. Side-note: the connection between your apps and the reverse proxy would be plain HTTP.
  4. Make sure your domain/subdomain points to the address of your reverse proxy.

The exact steps depend on your choice of reverse proxy.


IMO, vanilla nginx as the reverse proxy for a homelab is not the best option, especially when you are not already familiar with it. This topic can be useful for picking a reverse proxy – Hosting Domain via TrueNAS Best Practices: NGINX, Traefik, or Caddy.