Hi, how do you run forgejo under a reverse proxy while using an ssh channel to pull/push commits?
From what I understand caddy is only able to proxy http traffic.
There’s really no need to reverse proxy ssh. What are you attempting to accomplish with the reverse proxy exactly? Http proxying allows you to add things like TLS encryption and modify headers. But ssh is a secure protocol already and you can’t really modify much in transit.
There are plenty of valid reasons to want to use a reverse proxy for SSH:
- Maybe there is a Forgejo instance and Gitea instance running on the same server.
- Maybe there is a Prod Forgejo instance and Dev Forgejo instance running on the same server.
- Maybe both Forgejo and an SFTP are running on the same server.
- Maybe Forgejo is running in a cluster like Docker Swarm or Kubernetes
- Maybe there is a desire to have Caddy act as a bastion host due to an inability to run a true bastion host for SSH or reduce maintenance of managing yet another service/server in addition to Caddy
Regardless of the reason, your last point is valid and the real issue here. I do not think it is possible for Caddy to reverse proxy SSH traffic - at least not without additional software (either on the client, server, or both) or some overly complicated (and likely less secure) setup. This may be possible if TCP traffic included SNI information, but unfortunately it does not.
There are a few ways to do it, but you don’t use caddy for SSH.
- host SSH on port 22, forgejo on a different port. Expose both ports to the internet
- host SSH on a different port, forgejo on port 22. Expose both ports to the internet
- host SSH on port 22. Forgejo on port 2222. Only 22 exposed to the internet. Change the authorized_keys user of the git user on host to automatically call the internal forgejo SSH app
Last option is how I run my Gitea instance, authorized keys is managed by gitea so you don’t really need to do anything high maintenance.
~git/.ssh/authorized_keys:
command="/usr/local/bin/gitea --config=/data/gitea/conf/app.ini serv key-9",no-port-forwarding,no-X11-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding,no-pty,no-user-rc,restrict ssh-rsa PUBLICKEYHASH
/usr/local/bin/gitea:
ssh -p 2222 -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no git@127.0.0.14 "SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND=\"$SSH_ORIGINAL_COMMAND\" $0 $@"
127.0.0.14 is the local git docker access where I expose the service, but you couldn’t different ports, IPS, etc.
Learn NGINX that is the only answer, it’s a B!+€# to get configured but once you know how it will save you so much time, If you want cheat mode run the docker image and use the web interface but make sure to rtfm there are some gotch ya’s
Use something that can do TCP, i.e. HAProxy, NGINX or Apache
Not really through Caddy but for my setup I have it so the ssh port for Forgejo is only accessible through tailscale. So for push/pulling updated my ssh config file to something like
Host git.mysite.com HostName tailscaleMachineName User git Port 1234
Then doing git pull git@git.mysite.com:user/project.git works just fine as long as I am connected to tailscale
Otherwise you could open the port for Forgejo’s ssh so that you can access it without any vpn
I feel silly for not realizing that the SSH config would be used by Git!
I thought if Forgejo’s SSH service listened to a non-standard port that you would have to do commands with the port in the command similar to below (following your example). I guess I assumed Git did not directly use the client’s SSH service.
git pull git@git.mysite.com:1234:user/project.git
