Selfhosted
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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I’m gonna play devil’s advocate here.
You should play around with it. But I’ve been a Linux server admin for a long time and — this might be unpopular — I think Docker is unimportant for your situation. I use Docker daily at work and I love it. But I didn’t bother with it for my home server. I’ll never need to scale it or deploy anything repeatedly or where I need 100% uptime.
At home, I tend to try out new things and my old docker-compose files are just not that valuable. Docker is amazing at work where I have different use cases but it mostly just adds needless complexity on a home server.
That's exactly how I feel about it. Except (as noted in my post..) the software availability issue. More and more stuff I want is "docker first" and I really have to go out of my way to install and maintain non docker versions. Case in point - I'm trying to evaluate Immich so I can move off Google photos. It looks really nice, but it seems to be effectively "docker only."
The advantage of docker, as I see it for home labs, is keeping things tidy, ensuring compatibility, and easy to manage/backup setup configs, app configs, and app data. It is all very predictable and manageable. I can move my docker compose and data from one host to another in literal seconds. I can, likewise, spin up and down test environments in seconds too. Obviously the whole scaling thing that people love containers for is pointless in a homelab, but many of the things that make it scalable also make it easy to manage.
Im probably the opposite of you! Started using docker at home after messing up my raspberry pi a few too many times trying stuff out, and not really knowing what the hell I was doing. Since moved to a proper nas, with (for me, at least) plenty of RAM.
Love the ability to try out a new service, which is kind of self-documenting (especially if I write comments in the docker-compose file). And just get rid of it without leaving any trace if it's not for me.
Added portainer to be able to check on things from my phone browser, grafana for some pretty metrics and graphs, etc etc etc.
And now at work, it's becoming really, really useful, and I'm the only person in my (small, scientific research) team who uses containers regularly. While others are struggling to keep their fragile python environments working, I can try out new libraries, take my env to the on-prem HPC or the external cloud, and I don't lose any time at all. Even "deployed" some little utility scripts for folks who don't realise that they're actually pulling my image from the internal registry when they run it. A much, much easier way of getting a little time-saving script into the hands of people who are forced to use Linux but don't have a clue how to use it.