I just noticed that the docker install for rootless uses port 2222 internally whilst the normal latest uses port 22; Its not obvious from any documentation other than the compose.yaml files, so what is the reason?
The reason is quite simple. The rootful variant uses an S6 overlay service in the container, which starts a classic OpenSSH service in addition to the actual Gitea service. This runs as usual on port 22.
The rootless variant, on the other hand, uses the built-in SSH service in Gitea itself. Since the rootless variant does not run as root, it can only use ports > 1024. Accordingly, it runs on port 2222 by default.
Thanks that helps me understand something, although it doesn’t completely answer it. I have now switched over to rootful version and have it running, although it seems to be very sensitive to which directories on my synology NAS I tell it to use. Its own dedicated share fails, but inside my docker share it its own directory it works fine.