I outline my voyage and pains through which I found Docker and I aim to convince just one person reading this, that Docker is worth learning and using.

I’ve been lurking around in r/selfhosted for about a year now, spying on the apps that people self-host, and their pretty dashboards full of self-hosted apps. Over time I observed some dissent in the community. There exists a group of people that vehemently reject the use of Docker.

…what happens if the container is not maintained further? i have no desire to do that. I still prefer to install my dependencies, run the applications via systemd and set up an nginx reverse proxy. i still feel like i can interact with the process. (Reddit)

I’m a person who has never really been too fond of Docker. I like having full control of the applications I’m running, their configuration and their storage. With Docker, I’ve always felt like I’ve lost a bit of that control. (Reddit)

Reading those comments made me wonder:

Are there others out there who shares the same perspective as them?

In this piece, I outline the journey through which I found Docker and I aim to convince just one person reading this, that Docker is worth learning and using.

LEMP — Linux, Nginx, MySQL, Phpain

As performance was absolutely abysmal on the Raspberry Pi 1 Model B in my Octopi cluster, I spent a few months tuning php-fpm for performance and configuring nginx for security. I found that that process almost never works as expected. Raspberry Pi and its OS, Raspbian, differs vastly from others hosting LEMP stacks out there. Therefore, what worked on guides and tutorials are almost guaranteed to not work on my setup without significant modification.

Sources of headache

• Missing system dependencies
• System dependencies with strange Raspbian defaults
• Outdated system packages in the Raspbian APT repository
• System packages not pre-compiled for the Arm architecture

To make matters worse, even though I commit my configuration files to git, I have had to make live changes on the server nodes to iterate quickly and eventually I lost track of how I broke the site in ways I can only imagine.

That path, almost always ends in a painful full reinstall of the LAMP stack.

#wordpress #docker-swarm #docker #docker-compose #raspberry-pi