Why 7443

Local Drive serves on port 7443, not 443.

A machine you self host on usually has other things on it, and 443 is the first port anything else will want. Taking it by default would make Local Drive the awkward neighbour on every machine it lands on. 7443 reads as "443, but ours", sits outside the range distributions hand to system services, and does not collide with anything common.

Change it during setup, or by editing LD_PORT in .env and restarting.

7443 is used twice, over two protocols

	Protocol	What it is
7443	TCP	The server itself. This is the one that matters.
7443	UDP	The discovery beacon, so the apps can find the server without being told an address.

The same number on purpose, so there is one to remember and one firewall rule to allow. Blocking the UDP half costs you discovery and nothing else: typing the address still works exactly the same. See Finding the server.

With no domain, which is the normal case

Most people running this do not own a domain pointed at the machine. That is fine and fully supported:

The server is reached at whatever address the machine already has on the network, for example http://192.168.1.10:7443.
That is plain HTTP, because no certificate authority issues certificates for an address like that one. Traffic stays on your own network.
Set LD_DOMAIN if you have a domain pointing at the machine, and it becomes real HTTPS with no warnings. See HTTP and HTTPS.

The app also finds the server for you over mDNS, so in practice nobody types an address at all.

With a domain

If you do own one, localdrive setup asks for it and switches to a publicly trusted certificate, renewed automatically. Set LD_DOMAIN and optionally LD_TLS_EMAIL for renewal notices.

With a domain set, PUBLIC_BASE_URL is filled in and share links and invite links become absolute URLs to it. Without one there is no single correct address, since the same server answers on every address the machine has, so the app fills in whichever one it connected to.

What the client does with a typed address

Typed	Becomes	Why
`192.168.1.10`	`http://192.168.1.10:7443`	A bare address means "my Local Drive server".
`192.168.1.10:9000`	`http://192.168.1.10:9000`	An explicit port is respected.
`https://192.168.1.10`	`https://192.168.1.10`	A full URL means exactly that URL.
`nas.local`	`http://nas.local:7443`	A name that only resolves on this network cannot have a certificate.
`drive.example.com`	`https://drive.example.com:7443`	A public domain can, so it gets HTTPS.

The scheme is guessed from the address, because that guess is right almost every time: IP addresses and names ending in .local, .lan, .home or .internal only exist on your network, and nothing can issue a certificate for them. Anything that looks like a public domain gets HTTPS. Type the scheme yourself to override either guess.