𝘋𝘪𝘳𝘬

Why are people still accepting this?

Maybe have a look at Smart Launcher.

Okay, bye!

How do you handle SSL certs and internet access in your setup?

I have NPM running as “gateway” between my LAN and the Internet and let handle it all of my vertificates using the built-in Let’s Encrypt features. None of my hosted applications know anything about certificates in their Docker containers.

As for your questions:

1. You can and should – it makes managing the applications much easier. You should use some containerization. Subdomains and correct routing will be done by the reverse proxy. You basically tell the proxy “when a request for foo.example.com comes in, forward it to myserver.local, port 12345” where 12345 is the port the container communicates over.
2. 100% depends on your use case. I purchased a domain because I host stuff for external access, too. I just have my setup to report it’s external IP address to my domain provider. It basically is some dynamic DNS service but with a “real domain”. If you plan to just host for yourself and your friends, some generic subdomain from a dynamic DNS service would do the trick. (Using NPMs Let’s Encrypt configuration will work with that, too.)
3. You can’t. Every georestricting can be circumvented. If you want to restrict access, use HTTP basic auth. You can set that up using NPM, too. So users authenticate against NPM and only when it was successful,m the routing to the actual content will be done.
4. You might want to look into Cloudflare Tunnel to hide your real IP address and protect against DDoS attacks.
5. No 🙂