We shouldn’t go down without a fight, out plan A must be to prevent dystopia. And you are right that asking "what if"s can encourage a feeling of defeatism by distracting from plan A, however it’s generally not bad to think about a plan B ahead of time.
You can expose your stuff to the internet, that’s not inherently frivolous, but it increases your attack surface. If you use cloudflared, you can tunnel it through cloudflared, which helps not publicly exposing your IP (but your services are still publicly exposed). You might be able to use cloudflared together with gluetun, but I prefer having the reverse proxy and cloudflared outside of the gluetun network.
I haven’t tried any out-of-the-box solution or setup script, so I can’t talk about them. if you go diy or want to edit any solution to have internet access exclusively over VPN (or not at all otherwise), I can recommend gluetun. Other than that, I just have a simple docker compose file and a reverse proxy. I recommend not exposing it to the www, but to keep it only accessible in your local network, or tailscale, if your use case allows it. Note: if you set up https, you might be leaking your subdomains in permanent certificate transparency records.
I attune your family has human identifiable faces? Do you have a machine learning service container running? If so and if its enabled, it should just work. Otherwise, maybe try tweaking the parameters?
At work I use kubernetes and quite like that (upgrading containers without downtime FTE), but I didn’t bother trying to set up the infrastructure myself. Some argue, it’s not with the efford for self hosting, I dunno.
What I do like to use is Dockge, to keep docker but also keep your sanity. It even offers a single button for “docker compose pull”, which is great of you don’t have to many compose files / stacks. Combine with a simple shell script to batch pull/build all stacks in one go, plus some backup solution, and it’s actually nice to use and does all that I need. I love CLIs, but I’ve had situations where the GUI came in very handy.
#! /bin/bash
# note: this will update and START all dockge stacks, even if you stopped them before
shopt -s nullglob
for proj in /opt/dockge /opt/stacks/*/; do
echo "> $proj"
docker compose -f "$proj/compose.yaml" up --pull always --build --detach
echo ""
done
As a new user, I’ll just say thank you
[edit: removed the original link tracking from reddit OP]