For just one person limited use like that, i’d just use a VPN for whenever you’re away from home.

But you could learn a bit about hardening and expose it anyways if you want, I personally just want to be able to access my stuff from anywhere so I spend a decent amount of time hardening.

It’s not too hard, you really just need a certain baseline to defend against script kiddies and bot mass scanners. Unless you’re a business or a high value target or something that’ll attract the skills of “real” hackers

That’s one problem it solves, but NPM is really just a frontend for Nginx Reverse Proxy.

And a reverse proxy is one of the basic security steps you need to take when exposing something to the open Internet. You want everything forwarded through it and spend most of your time hardening it and the server it’s running on (and it should be the only thing running on that server, all other services should be running elsewhere, ideally)