A self-hosted DynDNS provider

Configure your dynamic DNS entries and update them automatically - no account required! Just you and your trusty, little server.

Supported DNS providers

Hetzner

.. that's it. Sorry.

Setup

Run the webhost either directly or through docker and make sure it's accessible from within your network, but not from the outside. We'll assume whatever you host the webhost on is accessible in your network as http://<your-ip>:<your-port>. Check out the docker-compose.yaml if you want to work with docker compose.

In your router, head to the DynDNS configuration and enter the following:

Provider: custom
Update URL: http://<your-ip>:<your-port>/api/v1/refresh
Domain (or Hostname): Not used, just enter whatever
Username: Not used, just enter whatever
Password: Not used, just enter whatever

Then, head to http://<your-ip>:<your-port>/ in your browser and configure your bindings.

That's it! If done correctly, it should all just work right away. You can press the "upload" icon next to the "delete" icon to force-refresh the binding on your provider or wait until the DynDNS module of your router kicks in and triggers the update.

Automatic schedule

You can also set an automatic schedule if your router does not have a DynDNS module. Or.. if you just prefer doing it this way.

To enable the schedule, start the webhost with the environment variable DYNDNS_SCHEDULE set to the number of minutes between the scheduled updates. We recommend 15 minutes, but you might want to adjust this based on the TTL for the DNS records on your provider.

That's it, basically. You can skip setting up your router if you enable the automatic schedule.

Notes

This is just a little something I've built for myself. There's no fancy logging (yet), no sane error handling (yet) or any other sensible features you'd expect a production-grade application to have.

But it does what it needs to do for my case, so I'm happy.

Security considerations

The API-Key is stored unencrypted within the container. Since this project has the sole purpose of pointing the whole web at your home network, make sure that nobody can access the API-Key just by connecting.