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?
dude, im kinda you. i just jumped into docker over the summer… feel stupid not doing it sooner. there is just so much pre-created content, tutorials, you name it. its very mature.
i spent a weekend containering all my home services… totally worth it and easy as pi[hole] in a container!.
As a guy who’s you before summer.
Can you explain why you think it is better now after you have ‘contained’ all your services? What advantages are there, that I can’t seem to figure out?
Please teach me Mr. OriginalLucifer from the land of MoistCatSweat.Com
You can also back up your compose file and data directories, pull the backup from another computer, and as long as the architecture is compatible you can just restore it with no problem. So basically, your services are a whole lot more portable. I recently did this when dedipath went under. Pulled my latest backup to a new server at virmach, and I was up and running as soon as the DNS propagated.
Modularity, compartmentalization, reliability, predictability.
One software needs MySQL 5, another needs mariadb 7. A third service needs PHP 7 while the distro supported version is 8. A fourth service uses cuda 11.7 - not 11.8 which is what everything in your package manager uses. a fifth service’s install was only tested on latest Ubuntu, and now you need to figure out what rpm gives the exact library it expects. A sixth service expects odbc to be set up in a very specific way, but handwaves it in the installation docs. A seventh program expects a symlink at a specific place that is on the desktop version of the distro, but not the server version. And then you got that weird program that insist on admin access to the database so it can create it’s own user. Since I don’t trust it with that, let it just have it’s own database server running in docker and good riddance.
And so on and so forth… with docker not only is all this specified in excruciating details, it’s also the exact same setup on every install.
You don’t have it not working on arch because the maintainer of a library there decided to inline a patch that supposedly doesn’t change anything, but somehow causes the program to segfault.
I can develop a service on windows, test it, deploy it to my Kubernetes cluster, and I don’t even have to worry about which machine to deploy it on, it just runs it on a machine. Probably an Ubuntu machine, but maybe on that Gentoo node instead. And if my osx friend wants to try it out, then no problem. I can just give him a command, and it’s running on his laptop. No worries about the right runtime or setting up environment or libraries and all that.
If you’re an old Linux admin… This is what utopia looks like.
Edit: And restarting a container is almost like reinstalling the OS and the program. Since the image is static, restarting the container removes all file system cruft too and starts up a pristine new copy (of course except the specific files and folders you have chosen to save between restarts)
It sounds very nice and clean to work with!
If I’m lucky enough to get the Raspberry 5 at Christmas, I will try to set it up with docker for all my services!
Thanks for the explanation.
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.
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.
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 .
Learning docker is always a big plus. It’s not hard. If you are comfortable with cli commands, then it should be a breeze. Even if you are not comfortable, you should get used to it very fast.
Definitely not a fad. It’s used all over the industry. It gives you a lot more control over the environment where your hosted apps run. There may be some overhead, but it’s worth it.
It just making things easier and cleaner. When you remove a container, you know there is no leftover except mounted volumes. I like it.
I use LXC for all the reasons most people use Docker, it’s easy to spin up a new service, there are no leftovers when I remove a service, and everything stays separate. What I really like about LXC though is that you can treat containers like VMs, you start it up, attach and install all your software as if it were a real machine. No extra tech to learn.
As someone who is not a former sysadmin and only vaguely familiar with *nix, I’ve been able to turn my home NAS (bought strictly to hold photos and videos backed up from our phones) into a home media sever by installing Docker, learning how the yml files work, how containers network, etc, and it’s been awesome.
