is there a way to do it without needing a reverse proxy or any additional software besides NPM? Was hoping I could keep things as minimal as possible

is there a way to use letsencrypt without nginx?

tried disabling the proxy seting under dns on cloudflare and I'm able to login, but I'd rather not have things unproxied.

I also still can't use https:// even when set to unproxied.

currently the ssl mode is set to Full, Minimum TLS Version is TLS 1.2, Automatic HTTPS Rewrites is set to On, Onion Routing is On, Opportunistic Encryption is On, and Authenticated Origin Pulls is On. also TLS 1.3 is set to Enable+0RTT

still getting expired session every time when logging in, and still unable to use https:// because of Error 523 on cloudflare. added the "port": 80, to the config, removed the :80 from the url and did ./nodebb restart

no, no nginx or anything like that installed, just simply went with what I saw on the doc page through putty. I already had npm installed for node.js, so I installed redis and ImageMagic (https://docs.nodebb.org/installing/os/centos/) and then just followed the docs and that was it. I'm trying to accomplish as simple and straightforward as possible setup.

Currently experiancing several weird issues after fresh install

Current setup:
OS: Centos7
Installed simply on a VM(no use of any sort of webpanel/apache/nginx/ect)
Database is Redis on 127.0.0.1
The Domain is set behind cloudflare with the proxie option enabled
firewall-cmd has port 80 opened for TCP and UDP

my config file has the following
{
"url": "https://forum.rapadantnetworks.org:80",
"secret": "Redacted",
"database": "redis",
"redis": {
"host": "127.0.0.1",
"port": "Redacted",
"password": "Redacted",
"database": "Redacted"
}
}

Currently when trying to use https:// the page gives me the cloudflare error 523 issue.

When using http:// loging in is impossible as it constantly tells me
Login Unsuccessful
We were unable to log you in, likely due to an expired session. Please try again

What do I need to do to fix this issue?