So your saying it should have never worked even if I was not using docker?
Correct.
Also it’s now working… I have no idea
Yeah that’s weird, I don’t know if you accidentally found a way to hack Windscribe into temporarily giving you a port forward on their free plan. But otherwise you do need to be a paid member on their Pro account for that feature.
Or it’s just going to randomly stop working again.
Is there a way to actually test your port forward within Docker? I’m not familiar enough with that configuration to suggest anything but maybe someone else knows about that. Usually without Docker I’d just start up the torrent client & then use a web browser with any port test website (https://www.canyouseeme.org, https://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports, etc.). But for Docker not too sure how to go about that.
You might be confusing public IP addresses with ports? If your torrent client doesn’t have a public IP address that just means it’s offline / no internet. Maybe your internet is down or the VPN is disconnected. You’re won’t torrent anything at all in that state.
For what it’s worth in the situation where both peers don’t have open ports (meaning they are both firewalled) they end up having to wait for another peer to join that torrent swarm that happens to have a open port, that’s the only way any data will exchange in that swarm. Until that happens those two peers will sit there waiting and not exchanging data.