How I Connected a Cloudflare Subdomain to My VPS — And the Gotcha That Got Me

BishalSunuwar202 — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:05:56 +0000

The Goal
I had a news portal (Nagarik Aawaj) running on a shared VPS at IP:8085. I wanted to give it a proper domain: devdigest.bishalsunuwar.com.np, using Cloudflare for DNS and free SSL.

What I Did

Registered bishalsunuwar.com.np on Cloudflare
Added an A record — Name: devdigest, IPv4: my VPS IP, Proxy: ON (orange cloud)
Set Cloudflare SSL/TLS mode to Full
Created an nginx server block on the VPS to proxy devdigest.bishalsunuwar.com.np to 127.0.0.1:8085 Simple enough, right? Wrong.

The Problem
After everything was set up, visiting https://devdigest.bishalsunuwar.com.np loaded a completely different website — gmls.com.np, another project hosted on the same VPS.

The Debugging Process
I ran some tests on the VPS:

curl -I http://127.0.0.1:80 -H "Host: devdigest.bishalsunuwar.com.np"

This returned my Next.js app correctly — so the nginx config on port 80 was working fine.

But when accessed through Cloudflare, it kept showing the wrong site. That was the clue.

The Root Cause
When Cloudflare's SSL mode is set to Full, it connects to your server over HTTPS (port 443), not HTTP (port 80).

My devdigest nginx config only had:

listen 80;

It had no port 443 listener. Meanwhile, the gmls.com.np config had a 443 SSL block. Since nginx had no matching server for devdigest on port 443, it fell back to gmls — the only other config listening on that port.

The Fix
I added an SSL server block to my devdigest nginx config:

server {
listen 443 ssl;
listen [::]:443 ssl;
server_name devdigest.bishalsunuwar.com.np;

ssl_certificate /etc/ssl/certs/ssl-cert-snakeoil.pem;
ssl_certificate_key /etc/ssl/private/ssl-cert-snakeoil.key;

location / {
    proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8085;
    # proxy headers...
}

}
The SSL certificate is just Ubuntu's default self-signed "snakeoil" cert. It doesn't matter that it's self-signed because Cloudflare handles the real SSL for visitors. The connection chain is:

User → HTTPS (valid Cloudflare cert) → Cloudflare → HTTPS (snakeoil cert) → VPS

After reloading nginx, the subdomain worked perfectly.

Key Takeaways

DNS A records don't include port numbers — just the raw IP address
Cloudflare "Full" SSL connects to your server on port 443 — your nginx must listen on 443, not just 80
On a shared VPS, nginx falls back to the first available server block if no server_name matches on that port — this is how one site can "hijack" another
Multiple sites can share port 443 — nginx uses the server_name to route requests, not the port
Self-signed certs are fine behind Cloudflare — Cloudflare doesn't validate your origin cert in "Full" mode (only "Full Strict" does) I almost mass googled the entire issue with wrong keywords before slowing down and debugging layer by layer. If you're running multiple projects on a shared VPS behind Cloudflare, I hope this saves you the headache I went through.

Have you ever had a "one line fix" that took hours to find? Drop it in the comments — I'd love to hear your debugging war stories. And if you have questions about Cloudflare, nginx, or VPS setups, ask away — happy to help.

Kairos — Fellowship Builder for Nepali Churches

BishalSunuwar202 — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 10:24:46 +0000

This is a submission for the DEV Weekend Challenge: Community

The Community

Nepal has thousands of small Christian fellowship churches — most run entirely by volunteers with no technical background. Every Saturday, a church anchor (presenter) manually types out the week's presentation: song lyrics in Nepali, Bible verses, sermon details, announcements, and prayer points — usually in PowerPoint.

What I Built

Kairos — Fellowship Builder is an AI-powered church presentation builder designed specifically for Nepali Christian communities.

An anchor fills in a simple form:

Fellowship date
Anchor name and sermon leader
Song lyrics (fetched automatically from a Nepali Christian songs library)
Bible references
Announcements and prayer points

Demo

kairos-weld.vercel.app

Code

BishalSunuwar202 / Kairos

Kairos — Fellowship Builder

An AI-powered church presentation builder for Nepali Christian fellowship communities. Fill in your fellowship details — anchor name, sermon leader, song lyrics, Bible references, and last prayer name — and AI generates a complete, slide-by-slide presentation in Nepali (Devanagari script), ready to project fullscreen.

🌐 Live: https://kairos-weld.vercel.app

Features

AI generates Nepali slide content and preserves names exactly as entered by the user, with Bikram Sambat (BS) date conversion
AI-generated warm Nepali Christian welcome message for each fellowship
Fullscreen presenter mode with keyboard navigation (arrow keys, Escape)
Slide format toolbar: font size, bold, underline, colors, padding, vertical & horizontal text alignment
Save and manage presentations in a personal library
Public shareable links — share slides with your congregation (no login required to view)
Print / export slides to PDF
Demo mode with a pre-filled sample Nepali presentation
Google OAuth sign-in

Stack

Next.js 16 (App Router) +…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

Tech stack:

Framework - Next.js 16 (App Router)
AI - Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite via Vercel AI SDK (@ai-sdk/google)
Database & Auth - Supabase (PostgreSQL + Google OAuth)
Styling - Tailwind CSS v4 + shadcn/ui
State - Zustand
Deployment - Vercel

How the AI works:

The form data is sent to a Next.js API route which calls Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite with a carefully engineered system prompt. The prompt instructs the AI to:

Output only valid JSON (no markdown)
Write all slide content in Nepali Devanagari
Transliterate English names into Devanagari
Convert the Gregorian fellowship date into Bikram Sambat calendar in Nepali
Generate a warm, faith-appropriate welcome message in Nepali
Split song lyrics into individual slides per section (Verse 1, Chorus, Bridge, etc.)
Follow a fixed slide order: welcome → host → opening prayer → lyrics → sermon → Bible → announcements → closing prayer
Why Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite:
It handles Nepali Devanagari script accurately, understands Bikram Sambat calendar conversion, and is fast enough for real-time generation of 10–15 slides.

The biggest challenge:
Getting the AI to reliably output parseable JSON while also handling Nepali script, calendar conversion, and name transliteration all in a single prompt. The solution was using generateText (not streaming) and stripping any markdown code fences from the response before parsing.

This was built to solve a real problem for a real community — and it's already being used.

DEV username - BishalSunuwar202

Please do give your feedback on what I can improve.

DEV Community: BishalSunuwar202