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?
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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!.
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.
It’s basically a vm without the drawbacks of a vm, why would you not? It’s hecking awesome
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol LXC Linux Containers NAS Network-Attached Storage PIA Private Internet Access brand of VPN Plex Brand of media server package RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SMTP Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SSD Solid State Drive mass storage SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access SSL Secure Sockets Layer, for transparent encryption VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) k8s Kubernetes container management package nginx Popular HTTP server
15 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 10 acronyms.
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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.
This is kinda where I’m at as well. I have always run my home services each in their own VM. There’s no fuss to set up a new one, if I want to move it to a different server I just copy the *.img file over and launch it. Sure I run a lot of internet services across my various machines but it all just works so I don’t understand what purpose there would be to converting all the custom configurations over to docker. It might make sense if I was trying to run all my services directly on the bare metal, but who does that?
VM’s have much bigger overhead, for one. And VM’s are less reproducible too. If you had to set up a VM again, do you have all the steps written down? Every single step? Including that small “oh right” thing you always forget? A Dockerfile is basically just a list of those steps, written in a way a computer can follow. And every time you build an image in docker, it just plays that list and gives you the resulting file system ready to run.
It’s incredibly practical in some cases, let’s say you want to try a different library or upgrade a component to a newer version. With VM’s you could do it live, but you risk not being able to go back. You could make a copy or make a checkpoint, but that’s rather resource intensive. With docker you just change the Dockerfile slightly and build a new image.
The resulting image is also immutable, which means that if you restart the docker container, it’s like reverting to first VM checkpoint after finished install, throwing out any cruft that have gathered. You can exempt specific file and folders from this, if needed. So every cruft and change that have happened gets thrown out except the data folder(s) for the program.
I’m not sure I understand this idea that VMs have a high overhead. I just checked one of my servers, there are nine VMs running everything from chat channels to email to web servers, and the server is 99.1% idle. And this is on a poweredge R620 with low-power CPUs, it’s not like I’m running something crazy-fast or even all that new. Hell until the beginning of this year I was running all this stuff on poweredge 860’s which are nearly 20 years old now.
If I needed to set up the VM again, well I would just copy the backup as a starting point, or copy one of the mirror servers. Copying a VM doesn’t take much, I mean even my bigger storage systems only use an 8GB image. That takes, what, 30 seconds? And for building a new service image, I have a nearly stock install which has the basics like LDAP accounts and network shares set up. Otherwise once I get a service configured I just let Debian manage the security updates and do a full upgrade as needed. I’ve never had a reason to try replacing an individual library for anything, and each of my VMs run a single service (http, smtp, dns, etc) so even if I did try that there wouldn’t be any chance of it interfering with anything else.
Honestly from what you’re saying here, it just sounds like docker is made for people who previously ran everything directly under the main server installation and frequently had upgrades of one service breaking another service. I suppose docker works for those people, but the problems you are saying it solves are problems I have never run in to over the last two decades.
Nine. How much ram do they use? How much disk space? Try running 90, or 900. Currently, on my personal hobby kubernetes cluster, there’s 83 different instances running. Because of the low overhead, I can run even small tools in their own container, completely separate from the rest. If I run say… a postgresql server… spinning one up takes 90mb disk space for the image, and about 15 mb ram.
I worked at a company that did - among other things - hosting, and was using VM’s for easier management and separation between customers. I wasn’t directly involved in that part day to day, but was friend with the main guy there. It was tough to manage. He was experimenting with automatic creating and setting up new VM’s, stripping them for unused services and files, and having different sub-scripts for different services. This was way before docker, but already then admins were looking in that direction.
So aschually, docker is kinda made for people who runs things in VM’s, because that is exactly what they were looking for and duct taping things together for before docker came along.
Yeah I can see the advantage if you’re running a huge number of instances. In my case it’s all pretty small scale. At work we only have a single server that runs a web site and database so my home setup puts that to shame, and even so I have a limited number of services I’m working with.
Yeah, it also has the effect that when starting up say a new postgres or web server is one simple command, a few seconds and a few mb of disk and ram, you do it more for smaller stuff.
Instead of setting up one nginx for multiple sites you run one nginx per site and have the settings for that as part of the site repository. Or when a service needs a DB, just start a new one just for that. And if that file analyzer ran in it’s own image instead of being part of the web service, you could scale that separately… oh, and it needs a redis instance and a rabbitmq server, that’s two more containers, that serves just that web service. And so on…
Things that were a huge hassle before, like separate mini vm’s for each sub-service, and unique sub-services for each service doesn’t just become practical but easy. You can define all the services and their relations in one file and docker will recreate the whole stack with all services with one command.
And then it also gets super easy to start more than one of them, for example for testing or if you have a different client. … which is how you easily reach a hundred instances running.
So instead of a service you have a service blueprint, which can be used in service stack blueprints, which allows you to set up complex systems relatively easily. With a granularity that would traditionally be insanity for anything other than huge, serious big-company deployments.
Instead of setting up one nginx for multiple sites you run one nginx per site and have the settings for that as part of the site repository.
Doesn’t that require a lot of resources since you’re running (mysql, nginx, etc.) numerous times (once for each container), instead of once globally?
Or, per your comment below:
Since the base image is static, and config is per container, one image can be used to run multiple containers. So if you have a postgres image, you can run many containers on that image. And specify different config for each instance.
You’d only have two instances of postgres, for example, one for all docker containers and one global/server-wide? Still, that doubles the resources used no?
Hi, also used to be a sysadmin and I like things that are simple and work. I like Docker.
Besides what you already noticed (that most software can be found packaged for Docker) here are some other advantages:
- It’s much lighter on resources and efficient than virtual machines.
- It provides a way to automate installs (docker compose) that’s (much) easier to get started with than things like Ansible.
- It provides a clear separation between configuration, runtime, and persistent data and forces you to get organized.
- You can group related services.
- You can control interdependencies, privileges, shared access to resources etc.
- You can define simple or complex virtual networking topologies between containers as you like.
- It adds extra security (for whatever that’s worth to you).
A brief description of my own setup, for ideas, feel free to ask questions:
- Router running OpenWRT + server in a regular PC.
- Server is 32 MB of RAM (bit overkill for now, black Friday upgrade, ran with 4 GB for years), Intel CPU with embedded GPU, OS on M.2 SSD, 8 HDD bays in Linux software RAID (MD).
- OS is Debian stable barebones, only Docker, SSH and NFS are installed on the host directly. Tip: use whatever Linux distro you know and like best.
- Docker is installed from their own repository, not from Debian’s.
- Everything else runs from docker containers, including things like CUPS or Samba.
- I define all containers with compose, and map all persistent data to host storage. This way if I lose a container or even the whole OS I just re-provision from compose definitions and pick up right where I left off. In fact destroying and recreating containers cleanly is common practice with docker.
Learning docker and compose is not very hard esp. if you were on the job.
If you have specific requirements eg. storage, exposing services over internet etc. please ask.
Note: don’t start with Podman or rootless Docker, start with regular Docker. It will be 10x easier. You can transition to the others later if you want.
It seems like docker would be heavy on resources since it installs & runs everything (mysql, nginx, etc.) numerous times (once for each container), instead of once globally. Is that wrong?
There’s nothing stopping you from using a single instance of those and only adding databases and config. The configs that come with projects set them up individually because they need to offer full examples but those configs are only meant as a guideline.
Also keep in mind that the overhead of just running multiple instances isn’t very big. The resources are consumed when you start having connections and using CPU and storing data and so on, and those are going to be the same no matter how many instances you have.
I would absolutely look into it. Many years ago when Docker emerged, I did not understand it and called it “Hipster shit”. But also a lot of people around me who used Docker at that time did not understand it either. Some lost data, some had servicec that stopped working and they had no idea how to fix it.
Years passed and Containers stayed, so I started to have a closer look at it, tried to understand it. Understand what you can do with it and what you can not. As others here said, I also had to learn how to troubleshoot, because stuff now runs inside a container and you don´t just copy a new binary or library into a container to try to fix something.
Today, my homelab runs 50 Containers and I am not looking back. When I rebuild my Homelab this year, I went full Docker. The most important reason for me was: Every application I run dockerized is predictable and isolated from the others (from the binary side, network side is another story). The issues I had earlier with my Homelab when running everything directly in the Box in Linux is having problems when let´s say one application needs PHP 8.x and another, older one still only runs with PHP 7.x. Or multiple applications have a dependency of a specific library when after updating it, one app works, the other doesn´t anymore because it would need an update too. Running an apt upgrade was always a very exciting moment… and not in a good way. With Docker I do not have these problems. I can update each container on its own. If something breaks in one Container, it does not affect the others.
Another big plus is the Backups you can do. I back up every docker-compose + data for each container with Kopia. Since barely anything is installed in Linux directly, I can spin up a VM, restore my Backups withi Kopia and start all containers again to test my Backup strategy. Stuff just works. No fiddling with the Linux system itself adjusting tons of Config files, installing hundreds of packages to get all my services up and running again when I have a hardware failure.
I really started to love Docker, especially in my Homelab.
Oh, and you would think you have a big resource usage when everything is containerized? My 50 Containers right now consume less than 6 GB of RAM and I run stuff like Jellyfin, Pi-Hole, Homeassistant, Mosquitto, multiple Kopia instances, multiple Traefik Instances with Crowdsec, Logitech Mediaserver, Tandoor, Zabbix and a lot of other things.
It seems like docker would be heavy on resources since it installs & runs everything (mysql, nginx, etc.) numerous times (once for each container), instead of once globally. Is that wrong?
You would think so, yes. But to my surprise, my well over 60 Containers so far consume less than 7 GB of RAM, according to htop. Also, of course Containers can network and share services. For external access for example I run only one instance of traefik. Or one COTURN for Nextcloud and Synapse.
