I was actively avoiding Docker too after I tried (and succeeded) getting Home Assistant running in Docker many years ago.
It seemed like a confusing mess when I did it back then and the resulting Home Assistant container ran like a dream for many years until it didn’t and I had no clue how to get it working again.
I ended up just throwing Home Assistant OS on the Pi I was amusing and it was very very simple to set up.
Anyway that was then. This is now.
I bought a mini pc in February and installed Proxmox on it.
Initially I just wanted Home Assistant, Plex and some kind of way of populating Plex with media.
I just ran VMs with bare bones programs installed in Windows. Problem is this took a lot of RAM and was flakey.
Cut to now, where I have a Home Assistant VM, a Linux VM and an OMV VM for my NAS.
The Linux VM has a bunch of Docker containers running that do everything my Windows bare bones VM did, but better.
I can access the containers via Portainer and update them with a button press. I cannot access the VM GUI because I passed through my GPU which knackered the console in Proxmox, and that is absolutely fine, if I need to do anything in the VM I have SSH.
My Linux VM uses less RAM than my Home Assistant VM, which is amazing considering what is running on it.
Docker is where it’s at! Takes a little learning but with Portainer installed it’s all in one GUI instead of SSH in to create text files and folders.
Yesterday I wanted to give Immich a try. So I found a tutorial on YouTube, went into his notes and found his GitHub and in there, his Docker Compose file.
I LITERALLY JUST COPIED IT AND PASTED IT INTO PORTAINER AND PRESSED GO AND HAD IMMICH RUNNING IN MINUTES.
Now the caveat here is that I’ve had a few months of playing with Docker now. I’ve tried to get Immich running a couple times and failed in the past few months. But I watched this guy paste his code in and press go, then start talking about how it works, so I was pretty confident he had taken the time to have a working compose file.
Wall of text to say get acquainted with Portainer and try installing and playing with some stuff. Bear in mind that it probably won’t work to start with and don’t rely on it until you’ve proven it out, but tinker with it until it’s working. Eventually you’ll get a feeling for it and it will become simple to you.
KyuubiNoKitsune@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
Docker and the docker-compose yaml files. They’ll be invaluable. Compose files allows you to create custom networking and run multiple containers.
Super useful and what most people use to run simple docker workloads.
You don’t have to understand how to create containers, just understand how they work and the commands to use them effectively.