I did some looking around for both Virtualmin & OpenProject and Virtualmin Alias Server but didn’t get what I hoped for.
I trust this one #113375 about making OpenProject run on its own machine.
Not what I wanted to hear, but not an impasse either.
And after looking at https://www.virtualmin.com/docs/ for Alias Server, I didn’t see the detailed info I thought I would. Here on the forum, I only found this one #137058.
I was expecting to find some info on how it would handle SSL through the redirection and other details about its capabilities. I see from the first reply on #137058 that I can set the IP address & forwarding variables to aim at the other machine.
So if I have a separate non-Virtualmin/Webmin device running OpenProject software, does it get the SSL cert, or does my Virtualmin main machine handle the SSL cert, or do both have to do it? I’m also not sure if I need to add any records to Cloudflare to ensure smooth operation.
Once I get the OpenProject set up on the non-Virtualmin machine, how does it know to answer with the content from just the OpenProject server to the Alias connector?
An alias is on the same machine. You need to setup proxying to anything on another system.
When proxying through the Virtualmin server, the TLS termination point is on the Virtualmin system, so it can manage the cert the user sees (if you encrypt the local connection from the Virtualmin system to the OpenProject server, you can use a self-signed cert for that connection since you can install the CA public cert into your CA bundle on the Virtualmin system).
Yes, if it’s something that wants to be in charge of the system or if it runs in a container (or set of containers) locally, you would proxy to it. That’s pretty much always the answer when something has its own app server, as well (nodejs apps, even when not containerized, have their own web server, Python apps, too).
Heck, even PHP running under PHP-FPM is actually proxying to an app server, it’s just got some syntactic sugar in the Virtualmin UI, since it is so popular and so broadly supported that we can assume that if someone is running PHP apps, FPM is the best way to do it. (There is no such universal app server in any other ecosystem that I’m aware of, and none supported by the upstream language provider like FPM is.)