Seafile with Cloudflare

I have been using a combination of Syncthing and Nextcloud, but have been finding that Syncthing often gets caught up in sync slowdowns, on multiple PCs whenever it needs to catch up with bigger changes. It's like a multiplied effect, and unfortunately Syncthing can be very resource intensive, especially on even a Raspberry Pi 5 or 4, or entry level laptops or desktops. So I have been testing Seafile as a replacement for both. The jury is out for how performant it is, but so far so good.

I have also moved my home server to another location, with better Internet. I cannot forward ports at the location, so I am using Cloudflare Tunnels, instead of Caddy previously. This works by installing a cloudflared agent on the machine, and tunnels traffic to the global Internet.

Initially I had some issues with it. The standard installation steps with Docker Compose did not work well. It either displayed a 502 error or a 308 (permanent redirect) error. I fought with the configuration settings for the docker compose files, and the Cloudflare config files for a while bit couldn't quite resolve it.

The solution

The fix was quite easy. I just removed the Caddy container from the Docker compose setup. The included removing it from the .env file as well. With Caddy gone, I could directly map the HTTP port to Cloudflare, which automatically set up SSL.

For the mobile app, it's important to not have mTLS enabled. I had that enabled in an attempt to fix it, but the mobile app doesn't seem to support mTLS.

I got stuck in this for a while, so hopefully it helps someone!