Mac server

Hoping others may have ways to achieve the objective of auto-launching services without having to log into an account on restart.

A LaunchDaemon is the proper way to do it. However, some things do not run without a user logged in. There is no way to bypass that. You would have to find a similar program that would run as a service.

From the original post, remote login doesn't require a user logged in. You should be able to SSH into the server without anyone logged in. You can configure sshd to only allow login via a certificate you generate. That would be more secure than username and password login.

However, you can likely use Screen Sharing to access it with a GUI instead of using ssh. I only have tried on my internal network, but the service is designed to work from outside, also.

No point in the discussion on keeping the device offline, as the point is to be running an online server.

I'm not sure where that came from. I didn't suggest it.

You would need to start all of those things via a LauchDaemon so that they are launched at startup. However, you may have things that require a user GUI login to exist.

Problem there is that then everything is exposed and no protection to physical access...not a good compromise.

How much more of a compromise is it than you already have created opening it up to the internet?

Do you have it properly secured? Maybe nobody needs to steal your Mini because they already have full access to it.