https-forward

Provides a forwarding HTTPS server which transparently fetches and caches certificates via Let's Encrypt. This must run on 443 and 80 (http:// just forwards to https://, no forwarding happens unencrypted) and can't coexist with any other web server on your machine.

Why? This is so you can host random and long-lived services publicly on the internet—perfect for other services which are served on http://, don't care about certificates or HTTPS at all, and might be provided by Node or Go on a random high port (e.g., some dumb service running on localhost:8080).

Note! This doesn't magic up domain names. You would use this service only if you're able to point DNS records to the IP address of a machine you're running this on, and that the machine is able to handle incoming requests on port 443 and 80 (e.g., on a home network, you'd have to set up port forwarding on your router).

Configure this via /var/snap/https-forward/common/config, which is empty after install. It should be authored like this:

 # hostname            forward-to          optional-basic-auth
 host.example.com      localhost:8080
 blah.example.com      192.168.86.24:7999  user:pass
 user-only.example.com localhost:9002      user       # accepts any password

 # Specify host with '.' to suffix all following
 .example.com
 test                  localhost:9000
 under-example         any-hostname-here.com:9000

 # Clear the current suffix with a single "." (otherwise below would be "*.example.com.example.com")
 .

 # You can include ? or * to glob-match domain parts (this does NOT match "-")
 *.example.com         localhost:9000
 test-v?*.example.com  localhost:9999    # matches "test-v1", "test-v100", but NOT "test-v" or "test-vx-123"

 # serves a blank dummy page (but generate https cert, perhaps as a placeholder)
 serves-nothing.example.com

(example.com used above purely as an example. You'd replace it with a domain name you controlled, preferably with a wildcard DNS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcard_DNS_record) record like *.example.com.)

Restart with snap restart https-forward to reread the config file (or try killall -SIGHUP https-forward to signal it instead). You can read logs to ensure that the file has been parsed properly:

sudo journalctl -f -u snap.https-forward.https-forward