How to Set up a Custom Domain and Certificates with TrueNAS Scale!!

3 min readMar 12, 2024

🚀 TrueNAS SCALE is a powerful and flexible operating system for network-attached storage (NAS). It is open-source and offers numerous benefits for both home and office networks. TrueNAS is a reliable NAS OS that supports a wide range of hardware. 🖥️ I even use TrueNAS on my older PC, which has an i3–6th gen processor, 16GB RAM, and 2 * 4TB Seagate Ironwolf HDDs. This article primarily focuses on using a custom domain on TrueNAS SCALE, whether you want to access it on a homelab environment or a VPN network. I will provide a step-by-step guide on how to set this up.

📋 Before we begin, make sure you have TrueNAS SCALE installed on hardware. You will also need a public domain name, or you can use one for your home-lab for free.

Here’s a simple trick to obtain certificates for a public domain and find the IP address for use in a homelab setup. Start by using the private IP of the server where you install Traefik or Certbot, and create a wildcard A record in the domain registrar. Then, use your DNS provider credentials to request a DNS challenge. This will allow your Traefik or Certbot instance to fetch wildcard certificates from Let’s Encrypt using DNS. These certificates can be used across your homelab. 🌐 🎉

Step 1: Set Hostname and Domain

First navigate to the Network section and modify the global settings. If your full DNS name is truenas.thinkncode.biz, enter truenas.thinkncode in the hostname field and biz in the domain section.

Step 2: Upload Certificates

To upload certificates, navigate to the “credentials” section and locate the “certificates” tab. Next, upload a key and certificate file and then click on the “save” button to finalize the process.