I meant to say thank you at least a day ago - so thank you very much! You've kindly provided a lot of detail, which I hope I can use for my own site. We'll see how we go... Thanks again.
It's my limited experience that nothing is easy, really, but in my case I'm looking for a solution which (a) works, and (b) is easily extendible when I add new containers.
I have several issues with traefik: first is that I can't access the dashboard. The second is that as I was given a LOT of help setting it all up (some years ago), I've ended up with config files that I don't fully understand myself. When I tried, for example, to use traefik for certificates to protect my installation of mealie, I simply couldn't. So my mealie instance is unprotected, running just with http.
I'm getting to the stage where I'm thinking about paying for some professional sysadmin time ... As I said in my OP, I'm nowhere near competent as a sysadmin, especially with networking, and if I can get something to work, I'm thrilled and never want to touch it again, in case I break it.
Many thanks - but what is the issue with public facing web servers? I though that if protected using https, they would be as safe as needed. Using a VPN would add a complexity I'd be happy to avoid. And indeed all my sites are remote, hosted as a VPS. Now you've got me worried!
Many thanks, that looks nice and within my limited abilities! I'll aim to try it out.
I currently use docker-compose to manage a number of containers, and I've been using traefik as a reverse proxy and to interface with letsencrypt for management of SSH keys.
However, I've also been reading a bit about caddy, which seems like an easier alternative to traefik, in the sense of its handling wildcard certificates. All my containers have a public facing url, like this:
blog.mysite.org
mealie.mysite.org
nextcloud.mysite.org
photos.mysite.org
which I would have thought would be tailor-made for caddy. However, in my rough searches I haven't found out quite how to set up caddy to do this. I've also read (can't remember where) that this use of caddy is ok for homelab, but shouldn't be used for public facing sites.
So I just need a bit of advice - should I indeed switch to caddy, and if so, how? (All I need is a few pointers to good examples.)
Or should I stay with traefik, in which case, what is the easiest setup?
(I got some help with traefik a few years ago, but I'm having a lot of trouble now extending my current config files to manage a new container.)
I'm also very far from being a sysadmin expert, I usually flail around until something works.
Thanks!!
Two things really: Dropbox as an automatic solution for file syncing and sharing; I needed to pay for an upgrade so I switched first to Onecloud and then Nextcloud.
The second was due to my work: I was an academic, teaching mathematics, and we were experimenting with online assessment systems. Most publishers provide one of their own, but then you have issues with contracts, student access etc. For example, a student could get access for one year. But many of our students were part-time, and took 18 months or more. This meant repeated calls to the publishers to issue new access codes. Since I already had a VPS, I put an open source mathematics assessment system on it and we ran it happily for a few years. I didn't mind paying for it myself at the start, considering it experimental, but when the university refused to host it themselves I gave up on it. It was good while it lasted, though.
I now need a decent photo management system (Immich sounds good) and start weaning myself away from Google.
This is something I've been meaning to "get around to" for a very long time, and I got quite excited seeing a recent discussion about Immich. And I looked at the various docker-compose files for Immich, and for Piwigo, PiGallery2, and PhotoPrism. Immich seems to require a number of different containers, whereas the others seem much simpler. That is to say, the docker-compose file for Immich seems very complicated.
Is this, in fact, an issue? Maybe I'm simply worrying about something which is not a problem.
And for a more generic question: for software that requires a database (as all image hosting does), do I need to start a new instance of MariaDB (for example), or can I use the database engine that's been set up in another container? That is, can I have one running instance of a database serving the needs of several different containers?
Thanks heaps, folks.