I never understood how to use Docker, what makes it so special? I would really like to use it on my Rapsberry Pi 3 Model B+ to ease the setup process of selfhosting different things.
I’m currently running these things without Docker:
- Mumble server with a Discord bridge and a music bot
- Maubot, a plugin-based Matrix bot
- FTP server
- Two Discord Music bots
All of these things are running as systemd services in the background. Should I change this? A lot of the things I’m hosting offer Docker images.
It would also be great if someone could give me a quick-start guide for Docker. Thanks in advance!
The thing with using the “latest” tag is you might get lucky and nothing bad happens (the apps are pretty stable, fault tolerant, and/or backward compatible), but you also might get unlucky and a container update does break something (think a 1.x going to 2.x one day). Without pinning the container to a specific version, you might have an outage suddenly due to that container becoming incompatible with one of your other applications. I’ve seen this happen a number of times. One example is a frontend (UI) container that updates to no longer be compatible with older versions of the backend and crashes as a result.
If all your apps are pretty much standalone and you trust them to update properly every time a new version of the container is downloaded, then you may never run into the problems that make people say “never use latest”. But just keep an eye out for something like that to happen at some point. You’ll save yourself some time if you have records of what versions are running when everything’s working, and take regular backups of all their data.
I used to have this with homeassistant and zwavejs. Every time I’d pull a new homeassistant, the zwave integration would fail, because it required a newer version of zwavejs. Taught me to build the chain of services into one docker-compose, so they’d all update together. That’s become one of the rationales for me to use docker: got a chain of dependent processes? wrap them in a docker so you’re working with (probably) the same dependencies as the devs.
My other rationale is just portability, and docker is just one of many solutions there. In my little home environment, where servers are either retired desktops or gee-that-seems-cool SBCs, it’s nice to be able to easily move stuff independent of architecture or OS.
I guessed it was a “once bitten twice shy” kind of thing. This is all a hobby to me so the cost-benefit, I think, is vastly different, nothing on my setup is critical. Keeping all those records and up to date on what version everything is on, and when updates are available and what those updates do and… sound like a whole lot of effort when currently my efforts can be better spent in other areas.
In my arrogance I just installed Watchtower, and accepted it can all come crashing down. When that happens I’ll probably realise it’s not so much effort after all.
That said I’m currently learning, so if something is going to be breaking my stuff, it’s probably going to be me and not an update. Not to discredit your comment, it was informative and useful.
