SWAG is great for overwhelmed Nginx beginners. It comes preconfigured with reasonable defaults and also provides configs for a bunch of popular services: https://github.com/linuxserver/reverse-proxy-confs. Both Bitwarden and Vaultwarden are on there.

Note that this setup assumes that you will run your service (Bitwarden/Vaultwarden) in a Docker container. You can make SWAG work with something that's running directly on the host, but I'd recommend not starting with that until you've fooled around with this container setup a bit and gained a better understanding of how Nginx and reverse proxies in general work.

If you aren’t too deep into the nginx rabbit hole then I would recommend Caddy very much, it is an amazing improvement over nginx and is much friendlier to configure and use. It also supports no nonsense integration with Let’s Encrypt as an added bonus!

You mentioned that you disabled the NGINX instance installed by Bitwarden, don't do that. Just change the port that it is hosting on and then point NPM at that port. You can also set the Bitwarden NGINX conf to use a self-signed certificate and then use NPM to manage the real cert.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

2 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.

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Their script has places you can specify a certificate and server name in the main config file inside your bitwarden data folder. Probably no need to use another container to accomplish the thing. For example in the config I disabled SSL and have my FW as the reverse proxy going to nginx:80.

Is bitwarden running in docker?

I'm not near a terminal to look but from what I remember I modified the given docker compose to comment out nginx and pointed the instance I already had up at the bitwarden container. There may have been another edit or two I stumbled over.

I'll look when I get home and edit this post. GL