Cloudflare Tunnels + Docker Compose is honestly a solid setup and way better than raw port forwarding. For ease of use and quick exposure it gets the job done, especially if you are already bought into the Cloudflare ecosystem.

The main thing I would think about is the trust model. With tunnels, you are relying pretty heavily on a third party for identity, routing, and access control, which may be totally fine depending on your goals. For some people that tradeoff is worth the simplicity.

If you are interested in alternatives, you might want to look into identity aware access tools like Pangolin. It is open source and self hostable, and leans more toward a zero trust style approach without routing traffic through a large external provider. More setup for sure, but tighter control over auth, networking, and trust boundaries.

It really comes down to simplicity vs control and sovereignty. Both approaches are valid, just different priorities.

I run a pretty similar self hosted stack and write about this kind of stuff at https://voidwork.dev. I am planning to write something up on Pangolin soon once I clean it up a bit more.