- Docker's built-in service management works plenty well enough for a lazy home setup, which saves you having to care about how your server's distro manages services.
- Using docker means I can easily specify the version I want to run.
- Docker images are, for some reason, often simpler to configure than OS packages, for the same result.
- It's also really easy to tell what you need to back up, and to be sure that you got all of it. Plus it's very easy to make sure everything—data and config—for every service lives in a single branch of the filesystem tree, for further convenience.
- For similar reasons, entirely erasing a daemon is very easy.
- Using docker means I don't have to care which version(s) of the software I need is provided by my distro, or go track down extra repos, or whatever. This makes it easy to run a boring-but-stable distro to minimize maintenance, but still have the latest versions of the things you're actually running, and upgrading one of them will never mess up anything else.
- There's a lot more server software available through docker-hub than most (all?) distro official package sets—and, again, that works the same no matter which distro you're on, so everything about it, including the knowledge, is portable.
- All that, using the exact same docker-compose files or simple shell scripts, works the same on any distro, plus macOS. Migrating to a new server can, trivially, be made as simple as rsyncing your entire docker-stuff tree and then doing one "docker-compose up -d" or running a single very boring and simple shell script one time.
Really, the only down-side is you can't use it on FreeBSD right now.
As someone who's run Linux servers (public-facing, even, in the early days) at home since, oh, 2000 or 2001 (plus managing them professionally) I can say that Docker's great for home servers. Less fiddly trivia to worry about. What distro's on my home server? I'm not even sure. I think it's Debian? Dunno. Hardly matters. I've written zero "config as code" stuff for my home set-up, yet could have a new server up with identical services in maybe 3-5 minutes longer than it takes to install the OS, and all but maybe a minute of that would be hands-off, just watching progress bars complete. With effort I could get that down even lower, but I got that much for free.
I agree exactly with what you said, since this is exactly my experience as a home hoster. To add to what you said, I suspect that Docker containers are much easier to configure than OS packages because they are all to some extent Twelve Factor compliant, which means that configuration and operations are simplified.
> To add to what you said, I suspect that Docker containers are much easier to configure than OS packages because they are all to some extent Twelve Factor compliant, which means that configuration and operations are simplified.
Yeah, I think that's got something to do with it. At the very least, you practically have to document right up front where all the config affecting the container lives, both files and env vars. It's also tempting to put the most commonly-used config items in env vars, if they weren't already. Consequently, dockerized Samba, for example, is the easiest config of that daemon that I've ever performed, for any of my never-unusual-or-complex use cases, including with GUI tools, over a couple decades of using it.
- Using docker means I can easily specify the version I want to run.
- Docker images are, for some reason, often simpler to configure than OS packages, for the same result.
- It's also really easy to tell what you need to back up, and to be sure that you got all of it. Plus it's very easy to make sure everything—data and config—for every service lives in a single branch of the filesystem tree, for further convenience.
- For similar reasons, entirely erasing a daemon is very easy.
- Using docker means I don't have to care which version(s) of the software I need is provided by my distro, or go track down extra repos, or whatever. This makes it easy to run a boring-but-stable distro to minimize maintenance, but still have the latest versions of the things you're actually running, and upgrading one of them will never mess up anything else.
- There's a lot more server software available through docker-hub than most (all?) distro official package sets—and, again, that works the same no matter which distro you're on, so everything about it, including the knowledge, is portable.
- All that, using the exact same docker-compose files or simple shell scripts, works the same on any distro, plus macOS. Migrating to a new server can, trivially, be made as simple as rsyncing your entire docker-stuff tree and then doing one "docker-compose up -d" or running a single very boring and simple shell script one time.
Really, the only down-side is you can't use it on FreeBSD right now.
As someone who's run Linux servers (public-facing, even, in the early days) at home since, oh, 2000 or 2001 (plus managing them professionally) I can say that Docker's great for home servers. Less fiddly trivia to worry about. What distro's on my home server? I'm not even sure. I think it's Debian? Dunno. Hardly matters. I've written zero "config as code" stuff for my home set-up, yet could have a new server up with identical services in maybe 3-5 minutes longer than it takes to install the OS, and all but maybe a minute of that would be hands-off, just watching progress bars complete. With effort I could get that down even lower, but I got that much for free.