Hey all. I’m hosting a Docmost server for myself and some friends. Now, before everyone shouts “VPN!” at me, I specifically want help with this problem. Think of it as a learning experience.

The problem I have is that the Docmost server is accessible over internet and everyone can log on and use it, it’s working fine. But when I try to access over LAN, it won’t let me log in and I am 99% sure it’s related to SSL certs over LAN from what I’ve read.

Here’s the point I’ve gotten to with my own reading on this and I’m just stumped now:

I’ve got an UNRAID server hosted at 192.186.1.80 - on this server, there’s a number of services running in docker containers. One of these services is Nginx Proxy Manager and it handles all my reverse proxying. This is all working correctly.

I could not for the life of me get Docmost working as a docker container on UNRAID, so instead I spun up a VM and installed it on there. That’s hosted at 192.168.1.85 and NPM points to it when you try to access from docmost.example.com - that’s all dandy.

Then, I installed Adguard Home in a docker container on my UNRAID server. I pointed my router at Adguard as a DNS server, and it seems to me that it’s working fine. Internet’s not broken and Adguard Home is reporting queries and blocks and all that good stuff. So that’s all still working as it should, as far as I’m aware.

So, in Adguard Home I make a DNS Rewrite entry. I tell it to point docmost.example.com to 192.168.1.80, where NPM should be listening for traffic and reverse proxy me to the Docmost server… at least I thought that’s what should happen, but actually nothing happens. I get a connection timed out error.

I’m still pretty new to a lot of this stuff and have tried to figure out a lot of things on my own, but at this point I feel stuck. Does anyone have advice or tips on how I can get this domain to resolve locally with certs?

I can provide more info if needed.

Cheers all!

Edited 19 April 2025 to add: Thanks for all the tips and suggestions everyone. I’m not 100% sure I fully wrap my head around what was going on here, but I did end up getting something working. I am going to continue looking into alternative solutions if only for educational purposes.

For anyone in future land who stumbles on this looking for help with a similar issue…

I’m not 100% sure what did end up fixing the issue, but I’ll remark on some things I did here. Check my comments in threads below to see troubleshooting steps and advice from others.

This bit is specific to Docmost itself, but I ended up switching the APP_URL variable from https to http. This change allowed me to login to Docmost over LAN using the IP:Port of the service itself, though my browser was of course warning me that the connection was not secure.

It may be just because I restarted my PC between tries, but upon trying it again tonight, the domain resolved when I entered it into my browser… but the issue now was that it was just going to the UNRAID login page rather than getting proxied by Nginx (which as a reminder, runs in a container on UNRAID system).

So I decided to spin up a different Nginx Proxy Manager container running in a VM on a different local IP, and pointed my Adguard Home DNS rewrite entry to that IP instead of the UNRAID system. Once I configured the NPM at that IP to proxy the address to Docmost’s IP:Port, voila! It worked! My friends were able to access Docmost at docmost.example.com and I was also able to access it at the same URL on my local network, and we were using the service simultaneously without issue.