is it better to use subdomains or paths? - eviltoast

I have a few selfhosted services, but I’m slowly adding more. Currently, they’re all in subdomains like linkding.sekoia.example etc. However, that adds DNS records to fetch and means more setup. Is there some reason I shouldn’t put all my services under a single subdomain with paths (using a reverse proxy), like selfhosted.sekoia.example/linkding?

  • drdaeman@lemmy.zhukov.al
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    1 year ago

    Some apps have hardcoded assumptions about the paths, making those kind of setup harder to achieve (you’ll have to patch the apps or do on-the-fly rewrites).

    Then there’s also potential cookie sharing/collision issue. If apps don’t set cookies for specific paths, they may both use same-named cookie and this may cause weird behavior.

    And if one of the apps is compromised (e.g. has an XSS issue) it’s a bit less secure with paths than with subdomains.

    But don’t let me completely dissuade you - paths are totally valid approach, especially if you group multiple clisely related things together (e.g. Grafana and Prometheus) under the same domain name.

    However, if you feel that setting up a new domain name is a lot of effort, I would recommend you investing some time in automating this.