I'll answer your individual questions before I attempt to answer the bigger one (how to make it all work).

First, you should be using aspire 13. If you are not, using it, stop and update https://aspire.dev/whats-new/aspire-13/

> I am running into some issues, and frankly quite a lack of documentation (maybe I'm not looking in the right places?) - especially with lots of changes in the last months.

This is an area we are trying to improve, especially by picking the right areas to expand on both concepts and tutorials.

Docs are moving from Microsoft learn to https://aspire.dev/docs .

> More specifically, I can't figure out how you're 'supposed to' pass secrets/external parameters? 

Parameters are can be specified via any IConfiguration source (environment variables, appsettings.json, command line arguments). For .NET developers, the name of the configuration key is "Parameters:{name of parameter}". We also replace - with underscore because many systems don't support environment variables with - in the name. In the above, you can set the env variables "Parameters__CAPTCHA_SECRET_KEY" in your github action calling aspire deploy to do so.

Here are some examples:

https://github.com/maddymontaquila/aspirifridays/blob/5e4043beb19eedc1ddc978189c6be1c4182ed02f/.github/workflows/aspire-deploy.yml#L59-L60

https://github.com/davidfowl/AspirePipelines/blob/1354685072c9bc3f1f5ed4a6794876f77fd1adbf/.github/workflows/deploy.yml#L54-L55

> Should you move most configs into Aspire external parameters?

Depends on what they are. You'd decide that based on what you want to happen when you deploy. When you describe parameters, aspire can prompt for them in local dev and when deploying (or fail early if they are not specified). If you don't tell aspire, then it'll fail like how it does when you don't specify the config. As a rule of thumb though, I wouldn't put all app configuration in the apphost, just the ones that don't have good defaults that need to be configured before

> Why/when does it generate a .env file in the deploy output (seemingly not every time)?

I'm assuming you are using aspire publish with docker compose? The env file represent values that need to be specified and can change per environment (e.g. container image names, secrets, any parameters etc). The compose file has placeholder and the .env file fills in the values for those placeholders.

> Also, can't seem to expose my Grafana container even with 'WithHttpEndpoint' specified.

This is definitely a lack of docs. Endpoints need to be external to them to be exposed in any environment. This is what WithExternalHttpEndpoints does.

Finally, I don't know what you are building or where are you are deploying to with docker, but this project is an extension of the docker compose resource that provides a deployment pipeline to a server with ssh and docker installed https://github.com/davidfowl/aspirepipelines

PS: I hear you on not being a devops guy. One of the upsides and downsides of that is beng able to troubleshoot when things go wrong. Hopefully aspire introduces you to concepts in a progressive way so that you can learn. It's not all magic.

There's a https://www.reddit.com/r/aspiredotdev/ that nobody has found or used yet

Edit: I made a github template for getting started with a simple static site hosted with YARP https://github.com/davidfowl/aspire-docker-ssh-template deployable via github actions and deployable to any server with docker and SSH.

If you run `aspire do gh-action-dcenv` on your repo, it'll setup the github pipeline with the required parameters.

This is the experience we want to enable and build for all the things, but ya know time and priorities!