…baby don’t hurt me… No more…

Thanks for asking this question. These replies are so much more helpful in understanding the basic premise than anything I’ve come across.

Wow! Thank you all for the civilized responses. This all sounds so great. I am older and I feel like I’ve already seen enough ads for one lifetime and I hate all this fascist tracking crap.

But how does that work? Is it just a network on which you store your stuff in a way that you can download it anywhere or can it do more? I mean, to me that’s just a home network. Hosting sounds like it’s designed for other people to access. Can I put my website on there? If so, how do I go about registering my domain each year. I’m not computer illiterate but this sounds kind of beyond my skill level. I’ll go search Jellyfin, weird name, and see what I can find. Thanks again!

Now compare Docker vs LXC vs Chroot vs Jails and the performance and security differences. I feel a lot of people here are biased without knowing the differences (pros and cons).

It’s the platform that runs all of your services in containers. This means they are separated from your system.

Also what are other services that might be interesting to self host in The future?

Nextcloud, the Arr stack, your future app, etc etc.

Docker enables you to create instances of an operating system running within a “container” which doesn’t access the host computer unless it is explicitly requested. This is done using a Dockerfile, which is a file that describes in detail all of the settings and parameters for said instance of the operating system. This might be packages to install ahead of time, or commands to create users, compile code, execute code, and more.

This is instance of an operating system, usually a “server,” is great because you can throw the server away at any time and rebuild it with practically zero effort. It will be just like new. There are many reasons to want to do that; who doesn’t love a fresh install with the bare necessities?

On the surface (and the rabbit hole is deep!), Docker enables you to create an easily repeated formula for building a server so that you don’t get emotionally attached to a server.

Its an extremely fast and insecure way to setup services. Avoid it unless you want to download and execute malicious code.

Pretty good intro for absolute beginners here…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg19Z8LL06w

This thread:

Jails make docker look like windows 11 with copilot.

Learn Docker even if you have a single app. I do the same with a Minecraft server.

• No dependency issues
• All configuration (storage/network/application management) can be done via a single file (compose file)
• Easy roll-backs possible
• Maintain multiple versions of the app while keeping them separate
• Recreate the server on a different server/machine using only the single configuration file
• Config is standardized so easy to read

You will save a huge amount of time managing your app.

PS: I would like to give a shout out to podman as the rootless version of Docker

It’s a container service. Containers are similar to virtual machines but less separate from the host system. Docker excels in creating reproducible self contained environments for your applications. It’s not the simplest solution out there but once you understand the basics it is a very powerful tool for system reliability.

You can think of Docker as something that lets you run all of your self-hosted services inside of their own virtual machine. To each service, it looks like that service is running on its own separate computer. (A Docker container is not actually a virtual machine, it’s something much faster than that, but I like to think about it the same way. It has similar advantages.)

This has a few advantages. For example, if there is a security vulnerability in one of your services, it’s less likely to affect your whole server if that vulnerable service is inside of a Docker container. Even if the vulnerability lets an attacker see files on your system, the only “system” they can see is the one inside of the Docker container. They can’t look at anything else on the rest of your actual computer, they can only see the Docker “virtual machine” that you created for that one service.

Please don’t call yourself stupid. The common internet slang for that is ELI5 or “explain [it] like I’m 5 [years old]”.

I’ll also try to explain it:

Docker is a way to run a program on your machine, but in a way that the developer of the program can control.
It’s called containerization and the developer can make a package (or container) with an operating system and all the software they need and ship that directly to you.

You then need the software docker (or podman, etc.) to run this container.

Another advantage of containerization is that all changes stay inside the container except for directories you explicitly want to add to the container (called volumes).
This way the software can’t destroy your system and you can’t accidentally destroy the software inside the container.

I’m not sure how familiar you are with computers in general, but I think the best way to explain Docker is to explain the problem it’s looking to solve. I’ll try and keep it simple.

Imagine you have a computer program. It could be any program; the details aren’t important. What is important, though, is that the program runs perfectly fine on your computer, but constantly errors or crashes on your friend’s computer.

Reproducibility is really important in computing, especially if you’re the one actually programming the software. You have to be certain that your software is stable enough for other people to run without issues.

Docker helps massively simplify this dilemma by running the program inside a ‘container’, which is basically a way to run the same exact program, with the same exact operating system and ‘system components’ installed (if you’re more tech savvy, this would be packages, libraries, dependencies, etc.), so that your program will be able to run on (best-case scenario) as many different computers as possible. You wouldn’t have to worry about if your friend forgot to install some specific system component to get the program running, because Docker handles it for you. There is nuance here of course, like CPU architecture, but for the most part, Docker solves this ‘reproducibility’ problem.

Docker is also nice when it comes to simply compiling the software in addition to running it. You might have a program that requires 30 different steps to compile, and messing up even one step means that the program won’t compile. And then you’d run into the same exact problem where it compiles on your machine, but not your friend’s. Docker can also help solve this problem. Not only can it dumb down a 30-step process into 1 or 2 commands for your friend to run, but it makes compiling the code much less prone to failure. This is usually what the Dockerfile accomplishes, if you ever happen to see those out in the wild in all sorts of software.

Also, since Docker puts things in ‘containers’, it also limits what resources that program can access on your machine (but this can be very useful). You can set it so that all the files it creates are saved inside the container and don’t affect your ‘host’ computer. Or maybe you only want to give permission to a few very specific files. Maybe you want to do something like share your computer’s timezone with a Docker container, or prevent your Docker containers from being directly exposed to the internet.

There’s plenty of other things that make Docker useful, but I’d say those are the most important ones–reproducibility, ease of setup, containerization, and configurable permissions.

One last thing–Docker is comparable to something like a virtual machine, but the reason why you’d want to use Docker over a virtual machine is much less resource overhead. A VM might require you to allocate gigabytes of memory, multiple CPU cores, even a GPU, but Docker is designed to be much more lightweight in comparison.

Okay, so way back when, Google needed a way to install and administer 500 new instances of whatever web service they had going on without it being a nightmare. So they made a little tool to make it easier to spin up random new stuff easily and scriptably.

So then the whole rest of the world said “Hey Google’s doing that and they’re super smart, we should do that too.” So they did. They made Docker, and for some reason that involved Y Combinator giving someone millions of dollars for reasons I don’t really understand.

So anyway, once Docker existed, nobody except Google and maybe like 50 other tech companies actually needed to do anything that it was useful for (and 48 out of those 50 are too addled by layoffs and nepotism to actually use Borg / K8s/ Docker (don’t worry they’re all the the same thing) for its intended purpose.) They just use it so their tech leads can have conversations at conferences and lunches where they make it out like anyone who’s not using Docker must be an idiot, which is the primary purpose for technology as far as they’re concerned.

But anyway in the meantime a bunch of FOSS software authors said “Hey this is pretty convenient, if I put a setup script inside a Dockerfile I can literally put whatever crazy bullshit I want into it, like 20 times more than even the most certifiably insane person would ever put up with in a list of setup instructions, and also I can pull in 50 gigs of dependencies if I want to of which 2,421 have critical security vulnerabilities and no one will see because they’ll just hit the button and make it go.”

And so now everyone uses Docker and it’s a pain in the ass to make any edits to the configuration or setup and it’s all in this weird virtualized box, and the “from scratch” instructions are usually out of date.

The end