Hello! 😀
I want to share my thoughts on docker and maybe discuss about it!
Since some months I started my homelab and as any good “homelabing guy” I absolutely loved using docker. Simple to deploy and everything. Sadly these days my mind is changing… I recently switch to lxc containers to make easier backup and the xperience is pretty great, the only downside is that not every software is available natively outside of docker 🙃
But I switch to have more control too as docker can be difficult to set up some stuff that the devs don’t really planned to.
So here’s my thoughts and slowly I’m going to leave docker for more old-school way of hosting services. Don’t get me wrong docker is awesome in some use cases, the main are that is really portable and simple to deploy no hundreds dependencies, etc. And by this I think I really found how docker could be useful, not for every single homelabing setup, and it’s not my case.

Maybe I’m doing something wrong but I let you talk about it in the comments, thx.

  • huskypenguin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    31·
    1 day ago

    I love docker, and backups are a breeze if you’re using ZFS or BTRFS with volume sending. That is the bummer about docker, it relies on you to back it up instead of having its native backup system.

    • foremanguyOPEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      What are you hosting on docker? Are you configuring your apps after? Did you used the prebuild images or build yourself?

      • huskypenguin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        I use the *arr suite, a project zomboid server, a foundry vtt server, invoice ninja, immich, next cloud, qbittorrent, and caddy.

        I pretty much only use prebuilt images, I run them like appliances. Anything custom I’d run in a vm with snapshots as my docker skills do not run that deep.

        • foremanguyOPEnglish
          1·
          10 hours ago

          This why I don’t get anything from using docker I want to tweak my configuration and docker is adding an extra level of complexity

      • huskypenguin@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        I should also say I use portainer for some graphical hand holding. And I run watchtower for updates (although portainer can monitor GitHub’s and run updates based on monitored merged).

        For simplicity I create all my volumes in the portainer gui, then specify the mount points in the docker compose (portainer calls this a stack for some reason).

        The volumes are looped into the base OS (Truenas scale) zfs snapshots. Any restoration is dead simple. It keeps 1x yearly, 3x monthly, 4x weekly, and 1x daily snapshot.

        All media etc… is mounted via NFS shares (for applications like immich or plex).

        Restoration to a new machine should be as simple as pasting the compose, restoring and restoring the Portainer volumes.

        • foremanguyOPEnglish
          1·
          10 hours ago

          I don’t really like portainer, first their business model is not that good and second they are doing strange things with the compose files

          • IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            1·
            8 hours ago

            I’m learning to hate it right now too. For some reason, its refusing to upload a local image from my laptop, and the alarm that comes up tells me exactly nothing useful.