samba-documents-provider VS DirectoryLister

This all feels like it should be 800x less of an issue because phones & tablets should just be able to connect over SMB & you should use whatever media player you want on your device.

Telling your home router to forward 445 is not that hard. Usinf minupnpc or just building in auto-port forwarding would be better. Alas I've seen some isp's block users from connecting to 445, which seems insane (my ispets me host there, but my parents isp blocks me from dialing home?!). So I often forward on another port (ex: 4445) and then everything works fine.

The main problem why the obvious "just use computers" problems doesnt work is... Android. Phones. These incressingly user-hostile anti-general-purpose-computing systems. Some of my media players still work with the 2017 code drom of the Android Samba Provider, but it uses old Android APIs so many media players wont work with it. I have no idea if Android still makes filesystem providers possible at all, but we havent seen any, and this one old one-time-drop artifact remains the only example I know of it ever having beem done ever on Android. But then again I really have had no interest in Box/Azure Drives/whatever... it'd be interesting/great to know if anyone does remote drives on android today. It feels wild that we have so much bespoke special software for remote media serving... when we have seemingly so little that does the general job.

https://github.com/google/samba-documents-provider

Ideally upnp/dlna should also somehow be an option too, but it assumes secure private networks I think? I'd love if it could be exposed publicly but locked down but it does all use mdns. And Tailscale's the only company on the planet who seemingly has the sense to extend our homenet's reach quickly/easily.

Since Android 13 the Google Samba client https://github.com/google/samba-documents-provider won't load. It's by far the simplest and best client I've seen (free, ad-free, works with the OOB file explorer). But it's knackered, and you know, Google and their abandonware makes me think it'll never be fixed.

This may be https://www.directorylister.com/ ? Ideal for holding / hosting files divided into folders + README.md file

Note: If it helps in any way, the resources I'm trying to upload to the nginx container are the ones related to the Directory Lister installation, so it's not a website actually, but uses index.php.

Ubuntu 22.04 - I've used Directory Lister many times on servers to graphically list files in a directory. I have a new VPS setup with a fresh apache install and php 8.2. I initially had errors with dom and zip not installed that I think I've fixed. I've changed /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/dir.conf to put php first:

DirectoryLister is very lightweight and free. The only thing it doesn't do is password/login, but you could do that at the server level. I use this on a DreamHost shared server, so it definitely works there. It's written in PHP, so it was very easy for me (a non programmer) to edit the footer of the output to include a link to tools located elsewhere.

Directory Lister - Also requires hosting, but free open source file repository platform that makes it easy to have a repository of tools, downloads, etc within an intranet or publicly if necessary.

Directory Lister is pretty cool and the design looks great.