this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
54 points (82.1% liked)

Selfhosted

40006 readers
553 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
54
Docker - what use is it? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
42 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I see Docker mentioned every other thread and was wondering how useful it is for non development things, and if so what they are.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 20 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

I could go in-depth, but really, the best way I can describe my docker usage is as a simple and agnostic service manager. Let me explain.

Docker is a container system. A container is essentially an operating system installation in a box. It's not really a full installation, but it's close enough that understanding it like that is fine.

So what the service devs do is build a container (operating system image) with their service and all the required dependencies - and essentially nothing else (in order to keep the image as small as possible). A user can then use Docker to run this image on their system and have a running service in just a few terminal commands. It works the same across all distributions. So I can install whatever distro I need on the server for whatever purpose and not have to worry that it won't run my Docker services. This also means I can test services locally on my desktop without messing with my server environment. If it works on my local Docker, it will work on my server Docker.

There are a lot of other uses for it, like isolated development environments and testing applications using other Linux distro libraries, to name a couple, but again, I personally mostly just use it as a simple service manager.

tldr + eli5 - App devs said "works on my machine", so Docker lets them ship their machine.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

So I can install whatever distro I need on the server for whatever purpose and not have to worry that it won't run my Docker services.

The one caveat to that is switching between something ARM-based like a Pi and an x86 server. Many popular services have ARM versions but not all do.

Edit: In saying that, building your own image from source isn’t too complicated most of the time.