I also like browsing folders of data, which makes backups easy. I only use volumes for sharing incidental data between containers (e.g. certificates before I switched to Caddy, or build pipelines for my coding projects).

Use volumes if you don’t care about the data long term, but you may need to share it with other containers. Otherwise, or if in doubt, use bind mounts.

Can confirm. I’d host my own, but I’m lazy and The Dude hasn’t given me a reason to.

Yup. Paying $50 or whatever for an extra checked bag is probably worth it.

To add to this, you should practice good security elsewhere as well:

• host everything in containers, and only let them access what they need
• manage TLS behind your firewall, so a vulnerability doesn’t expose packets for other services
• run your containers with minimal privileges (look into podman, for example), so they’ll be limited if they escape the container
• use a strong root password (or no root), and put passwords on any SSH keys you use there (e.g. for git repos, accessing other servers, etc)

Once you expose something inside your network, you need to ramp up security.

Then you’d be wrong. Unless you pick SQLite and that’s all you need.

Generally speaking, if a professor recommends something, it probably sucks. Their information is incredibly outdated and is usually whatever they used in their own undergrad program.

At school I learned:

• Java
• PHP
• MySQL
• C#
• C++
• Racket (Lisp)

Each of those has a better alternative, with C# being the least bad. For example:

• Java -> Kotlin
• PHP -> Python
• MySQL -> SQLite or Postgres
• C# -> Python (desktop QT GUIs) or web stack (e.g. Tauri for desktop web stack)
• C++ -> Rust (non-games) or a game engine
• Lisp -> Haskell

Formal education is for learning concepts, learn programming languages and tools on your own.

Postgres. It’s more strict by default, which leads to a lot fewer surprises.

Here’s my rule of thumb:

1. SQLite - if it’s enough
2. Postgres
3. MariaDB - if you don’t care about your data and just want the thing to work
4. MySQL - if you sold your soul to Oracle, but still can’t afford their license fee

Persistence and reading comprehension.

There’s no need to learn Python or any programming language to self host stuff, you just need to be able to follow blog posts and run some Docker commands.

I’m a software dev and haven’t touched a single line of code on my NAS. Everything is docker compose and other config files.

Wife is an adjective, keep up.

Not something so complex that it requires docker.

I disagree. Docker makes things a lot easier and I’m going to use it regardless.

My rule is pretty simple: not PHP. PHP requires configuring a web server, so either that’s embedded in the docker image, (violates the “do one thing” rule of docker) or it’s pushed onto the user. This falls under the dependencies part, but I uniquely hate dealing with standalone web servers and I don’t mind configuring databases, so I called it out.

I actually tried switching to OCIS from Nextcloud specifically to avoid PHP, but OCIS is even more complex so I bailed.

Give me an example configuration that works out of the box and detailed documentation about options and I’ll be happy. Don’t make me configure a web server any particular way, and do let me handle TLS myself. If you do that, I’ll probably check it out.