So, I have some idea on what a reverse proxy does and will be using nginx (with the neat proxy manager UI) for my setup.
However, I’m not completely clear what exactly I want it to do and how I cn use it to run different services on one machine. I’m especially unclear on the ports configuration … tutorials will say things like “change the listening port to xxx for that service and to port yyy for the other service”
How does this work, which ports can I use and how do I need to configure the respective services?
It sounds like what you need to do at this point is find what IP address your lemmy instance and mastodon instance containers are using on your VPS. you can do “docker inspect containername” and look for the IP address in there. it might be something like 172.16.0.1 for lemmy and 172.17.0.1 for mastodon. then you want to set up your reverse proxy to point lmy.my-domain.tld to 172.16.0.1:80 (or whatever port you set lemmy to use) and then mstdn.my-domain.tld to point to 172.17.0.1:80 (again, port might be different, i dont know what the default port is)
-IF- both of the containers are using the same IP, then you will need to make sure that they are using different ports. if they are on the same ip and same port, whichever container loads 2nd will fail to properly load, because when a port is taken on an IP address, it is reserved and nothing else can try to listen on that port.