So, I've been trying to accomplish this for a while. First I posted asking for help getting started, then I posted about trying to open ports on my router. Now, I proudly post about being able to show the world (for the first time ever) my abysmal lack of css and html skills.
I would like to thank everyone in this community, specially to those who took the time to answer my n00b questions. If you'd like to see it, it will be available at: https://kazuchijou.com/
(Beware however, for you might cringe into oblivion and back.)
Since this website is hosted on my desktop computer, there will be some down-time here and then, however I'll leave it on for the next 48 hours (rip electricity bill) only for you guys to see. <3
Now, there are a couple of things that need addressing:
I set it up as a cloudflare tunnel and linked it to my domain. However, I still don't know any docker at all (despite using it for the tunnel), and the process was too incredibly and stupidly easy. I don't think I learned as much as I expected and I didn't feel challenged at all.
The original idea was to do some port forwarding. (This was foolish and a bit of a waste of time). Despite getting a "public-ip-address" from my ISP, I still was unable to open ports successfully. I kept getting the same error again and again. If you'd like to read my original post about port forwarding you may follow this link: "[Solved] ((lie)) Noob stuck on port-forwarding wile trying to host own raw-html website. Pls help".
While I know doing this represents a security risk, I still wanted to at least have a small success with port forwarding. I just wanted to have the raw-internet-connection experience, you know? like, the basics and such. And Cloudflare is holding my hand way too hard, I want to feel like I can shoot myself in the foot (without actually doing so)
But to be honest, I'm quite happy with the outcome. There are many other avenues I'd like to explore in the future, like setting up a reverse proxy with nginx or even darknet hosting (as sugested by another commentor).
I hope to keep learning and some day help another poor soul like myself in a similar situation. I thank you again guys, you're the best.
[TL;DR] This is the best and most helpful community ever! thx <3
Also, is there any particular reason why my decision to use NGINX stood out to you? Is it a good start?
I wanted to use APACHE at first (really trying to go for that old internet experience) but decided to use NGINX because the learning resources were more readily available, (and I kept hearing "NGINX" everywhere)
Apache is more a web server and less a reverse proxy. Nginx shines as reverse proxy more than as a web server IMHO.
√But lots of people here prefer "simpler" solutions like traefik or caddy, seeing somebody jumping to nginx made me smile positively.
I'm learning docker now. I found a whole video about the reverse proxy capabilities of nginx and docker, so I'll be checking that out.
My goal is to have my own homelab and expose some services to the internet, or maybe even set up my own vpn so that I may access and configure things on my network from somewhere else.
I'm still struggling with the port forward thingie, and while Cloudflare tunnels are a nice thing to have, they protect me too much. I want a public IP address that I can use and register on a DNS, or ssh directly into my network from anywhere in the world. As I mentioned, I want to be able to shoot myself in the foot without actually doing so, (hopefully).