I’m a retired Unix admin. It was my job from the early '90s until the mid '10s. I’ve kept somewhat current ever since by running various machines at home. So far I’ve managed to avoid using Docker at home even though I have a decent understanding of how it works - I stopped being a sysadmin in the mid '10s, I still worked for a technology company and did plenty of “interesting” reading and training.
It seems that more and more stuff that I want to run at home is being delivered as Docker-first and I have to really go out of my way to find a non-Docker install.
I’m thinking it’s no longer a fad and I should invest some time getting comfortable with it?
Well, that wasn’t a huge investment :-) I’m in…
I understand I’ve got LOTS to learn. I think I’ll start by installing something new that I’m looking at with docker and get comfortable with something my users (family…) are not yet relying on.
Forget docker run, docker compose up -d is the command you need on a server. Get familiar with a UI, it makes your life much easier at the beginning: portainer or yacht in the browser, lazy-docker in the terminal.
you need to create a docker-compose.yml file. I tend to put everything in one dir per container so I just have to move the dir around somewhere else if I want to move that container to a different machine. Here’s an example I use for picard with examples of nfs mounts and local bind mounts with relative paths to the directory the docker-compose.yml is in. you basically just put this in a directory, create the local bind mount dirs in that same directory and adjust YOURPASS and the mounts/nfs shares and it will keep working everywhere you move the directory as long as it has docker and an available package in the architecture of the system.
`version: ‘3’ services: picard: image: mikenye/picard:latest container_name: picard environment: KEEP_APP_RUNNING: 1 VNC_PASSWORD: YOURPASS GROUP_ID: 100 USER_ID: 1000 TZ: “UTC” ports: - “5810:5800” volumes: - ./picard:/config:rw - dlbooks:/downloads:rw - cleanedaudiobooks:/cleaned:rw restart: always volumes: dlbooks: driver_opts: type: “nfs” o: “addr=NFSSERVERIP,nolock,soft” device: “:NFSPATH”
cleanedaudiobooks: driver_opts: type: “nfs” o: “addr=NFSSERVERIP,nolock,soft” device: “:OTHER NFSPATH” `
like just docker run by itself, it’s not the full command, you need a compose file: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/compose/
Basically it’s the same as docker run, but all the configuration is read from a file, not from stdin, more easily reproducible, you just have to store those files. The important is compose commands are very important for selfhosting, when your containers expected to run all the time.
dockge is amazing for people that see the value in a gui but want it to stay the hell out of the way. https://github.com/louislam/dockge lets you use compose without trapping your stuff in stacks like portainer does. You decide you don’t like dockge, you just go back to cli and do your docker compose up -d --force-recreate .
I would suggest docker compose before a UI to someone that likes to work via the command line.
Many popular docker repositories also automatically give docker run equivalents in compose format, so the learning curve is not as steep vs what it was before for learning docker or docker compose commands.
There is even a tool to convert Docker Run commands to a Docker Compose file :)
Such as this one hosted by Opnxng:
https://it.opnxng.com/docker-run-to-docker-compose-converter
