I am sick and slightly out of my mind anyway so I’m not going to be very helpful. One thing that stands out though, if you can SSH the machine and you can curl local host to Port 8,000 or whatever. This should help you troubleshooting the container while it lives on the VPS I think
Idk, I had not heard of gitea or forgejo before. Personally I really want strong & flexible CI/CD, and Don’t know what the alternatives have to offer there, but it would be worth looking into. GitLab is pretty resource-heavy even for low user count.
Self-hosting gitlab?
I’ve used Ghost Commander for this; I’ve tried several and disliked it the least. That said, really wind up doing SCP over command line with termux.
If you are trying to access several different services through the internet to your home network, you are better off setting up a home VPN than trying to manage multiple public facing services. The more you publish directly to the public, the more difficult it is to keep up with everything; It is likely needlessly expanding your threat exposure. Plus you never know when a new exploit gets published against any of the services you have available.
Literally the only joke I saw today was from Lockpicking Lawyer