Reverse proxying MotionEyeOS (with Caddy)

[axelsimon]

Hi, I have MotionEyeOS working on a rpi-zero, accessible on my local network, at meye.lan.

I'm trying to set up Caddy as a reverse proxy on a separate machine to allow access from outside the LAN.

Reverse proxying the main part of MEOS works fine, but the camera feed doesn't appear:

I understand this is because the camera feed is actually pulled from meye.lan:8081. I'd rather not have to open that port to the Internet and would like to have Caddy reverse proxy both the main app (meye.lan) and the video feed (meye.lan:8081).

I've tried following the instructions on the MotionEye wiki but either they are out of date or MotionEyeOS is just too different, because both the /cams/ and /mjpeg/ paths are 404 on MotionEyeOS.

Here is the relevant part of my Caddyfile config:

        monitoring.tld {
          redir /meye /meye/
          handle_path /meye/* {
          reverse_proxy meye.lan
          }
         ## different but related service, running in a local container
          reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:8000 {
              header_up Host {upstream_hostport}
          }
        }

(this makes my main service be served at https://monitoring.tld, and MotionEye served at https://monitoring.tld/meye)

Basically, i haven't figured out how to proxy the requests meye.lan makes to meye.lan:8081 in Caddy (yet!). Any clues appreciated!

Thanks!

motionEyeOS Version

dev20201026

Board Model

Raspberry Pi Zero

Camera

I am using the following type of camera: Simple MJPEG Camera (fast network camera)

My camera model is: Night Vision Camera Module

Network Connection

Wifi

Peripherals

no relevant peripherals

Log Files

no relevant log files

[starbasessd]

You can change the port used by the camera from 8081 to whatever you prefer in the file: /data/etc/camera-1.conf (stream_port) However, it is known to work with nginx but the folder references you are using aren't folder references in motionEye or motionEyeOS, they are tags within nginx. Given time, and any other's interest, I might check out how to set up your Caddy port forwarder... And what kind of containerization are you using? Is just Caddy in a container, or is motionEye being run in a container, too? Or even in the same container? and here is the port documentation for mEOS:

[axelsimon]

The setup is:

• mEOS running on a rpi-zero-w, with one cam
• NixOS running on a rpi4
  • Caddy running directly on NixOS
  • other related service running in a container, reverse proxied by Caddy

And as i was saying, i'd like to have Caddy reverse proxy the whole of mEOS, not just the main webpage.

Thanks for your answer in any case, @starbasessd !

[starbasessd]

Which NixOS? Which container system? What 'related services'? Looks like I might have time to spin one up this weekend...

[starbasessd]

My 'which NixOS' means which version did you start with, what updates, etc, because I may not be able to hit the same intermediary version that you have because of the way they handle updates...

[axelsimon]

Which NixOS, you mean version ? This is on 22.05. Using oci-containers and podman. I see your point regarding nix derivations and all that, but i think that's not really relevant, since that part works fine and doesn't touch MotionEyeOS in any way that i can think of.

The part that matters is that i'm trying to reverse proxy all of the parts that make up mEOS on a path of my domain, so, after re-reading the MotionEye nginx documentation, similar to how it serves MotionEye on /cams/.

Lastly, my ideal goal is not to have to open an extra port on my router's firewall. I think that if i can reverse proxy something at 127.0.0:1:8000 i should be able to reverse-proxy something at meye.lan:8081.

[starbasessd]

I will try to re-create your environment. Are you trying to reverse proxy all the ports for all the apps to a single port? That won't work. How would you differentiate between the effective sites? IOW if I connect to the outside firewall to port 56789, and the router points to NixOS:8000, I can't have it go to PiCam:8081 without a BUNCH of changes. Also, did you try going to port 80 on the PiCam instead of 8081? You might be able to create a web server which pulls all the web pages from your apps and put them in a single page, then reverse proxy that...

[starbasessd]

Are you running NixOS, or NixOS Package Manager on Raspbian? 32 bit or 64 bit? That is a weird setup...