Merge pull request 'blog/cloudflare-proxy' (#8) from blog/cloudflare-proxy into main

Reviewed-on: #8

.vscode/settings.json

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+{
+    "cSpell.words": [
+        "caddyfile",
+        "nslookup"
+    ]
+}

archetypes/default.md

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 title: "{{ replace .Name "-" " " | title }}"
 date: {{ .Date }}
 draft: true
----
-
+tags: [...]
+---

content/posts/2023/12/05/cloudflare-dns-proxy-with-caddy.md

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+---
+title: "Cloudflare DNS Proxy With Caddy"
+date: 2023-12-05T14:57:40-08:00
+draft: false
+tags: [on-prem, hosting, caddy, cloudflare]
+---
+
+I have been using [Caddy](https://caddyserver.com/) as my [reverse proxy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_proxy) for a bit now and its been great!  I have also been using [Cloudflare](https://www.cloudflare.com/) for my DNS given its all API driven.  But one thing I ran into issues with was being able to use Cloudflare to proxy my hosting IP behind one of their servers.  This would be allow allow a user to `nslookup` against my dns record and only tell them about the Cloudflare IP.  This is ideal because then I am able to hide my personal IP Address from the internet.
+
+But when I started with Caddy, I was not able to get this feature to work.  But at the end of the day I picked Caddy because it has [Automatic Https](https://caddyserver.com/docs/automatic-https).  This one feature and it being written in Go was one of the reasons I picked this.  I did attempt to use something like `nginx` but this was before I had my own domain, and my tests failed.
+
+## Dynamic DNS
+
+One of the other reasons why I picked Cloudflare was because it was API driven.  I have a Dynamic IP Address, and needed to ensure my sites would not be down when my IP changed.  So I created a little Go tool called [cloudflare-ddns](https://git.jamestombleson.com/jtom38/cloudflare-ddns).  The name is very basic but does the job.
+
+This tool is very simple.  Every 15 minutes, it will check my IP Address and make sure all my defined A records in Cloudflare match.  If they don't, then it will update them.  If that is of intrest to you, take a look at the source code.
+
+## Cloudflare DNS Proxy
+
+So now that we have a little bit of a background, one thing I wanted to figure out was how to make this all work.
+
+I did try to use the Proxy service in the past but due to time, I did not spend much time on it.  
+I had https already so I did not care to mess around with it too much more.  
+But I did go and enable the Proxy service to see what happened.
+
+When it was enabled I was getting `Too Many Redirects` back.  Well, this is because Caddy and Cloudflare both are trying to redirect my http traffic to https.
+Given the Cloudflare was also trying to handle https for me, this made sense.
+So to use the Cloudflare proxy, I need to configure Caddy to not handle https.
+
+## The solution
+
+So to make this all work its actually very simple.
+Open your `caddyfile` and update the record to define `http://` for the host you want.
+
+```caddyfile
+http://fake.domain.com {
+    reverse_proxy 192.168.1.1:8080
+}
+```
+
+Save the file and restart Caddy.
+
+Once Caddy comes back only, go over to Cloudflare and enable the proxy service on your A record and within a couple minutes, things should flow again!
+if you run `nslookup fake.domain.com` you should now see the DNS record not point to your IP but a Cloudflare IP.
+
+With that change you are now good to go!