Not exactly self hosting but maintaining/backing it up is hard for me. So many “what if”s are coming to my mind. Like what if DB gets corrupted? What if the device breaks? If on cloud provider, what if they decide to remove the server?
I need a local server and a remote one that are synced to confidentially self-host things and setting this up is a hassle I don’t want to take.
So my question is how safe is your setup? Are you still enthusiastic with it?
First of all ignore the trends. Fuck docker, fuck nixos, fuck terraform or whatever tech stack gets shilled constantly.
Find a tech stack that is easy FOR YOU and settle on that. I haven’t changed technologies for 4 years now and feel like everything can fit in my head.
Second of all, look at the other people using commercial services and see how stressed they are. Google banned my account, youtube has ads all the time, the app for service X changed and it’s unusable and so on.
Nothing comes for free in terms of time and mental baggage
Yes, you should use something that makes sense to you but ignoring docker is likely going to cause more aggravation than not in the long term.
Yep, I went in this direction…until I gave in during a bare metal install of something…
Docker is not hassle free but usually most setup guides for apps are much much easier with docker
Docker/Podman or any containerized solution is basically the easiest way to get really nice maintenance properties like: updating one app won’t break others, won’t take down the whole system, can be moved from machine to machine.
Containers are a learning curve but I think very worth it for home setups. Compared to something like Kubernetes which I would say is less worth it unless you already know or want to learn Kubernetes.
Docker takes a lot of the management work out of the equation as many of the containers automatically update. Manual updates are as simple as recreating a container with a new image instead of your local one. I would like to add try running Portainer (a graphical management interface for Docker). Breaking out the various options into a GUI helped me learn the ins and outs of Docker better, plus if you end up expanding to multiple docker hosts you can manage them all from one console. I have a desktop, a laptop, and a RPi 4b all running various dockers and having a single pane for management is such a convenience.
Not to mention the advantage of infrastructure as code. All my docker configs are just a dozen or so text files (compose). I can recreate my server apps from a bare VM in just a few minutes then copy the data over to restore a backup, revert to a previous version or migrate to another server. Massive advantages compared to bare metal.
Docker is not a shill tech stack. It is a core developer tool that is certainly not required, but is certainly not fluff