this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Should I be learning docker compose instead of relying on dockStarter to manage my containers? I got portainer up, should I just use that to manage my stack?

I’m committed this summer to finally learning docker. I’m on day 3 and the last puzzle piece is being able to access qbittorrent locally while running the container through the vpn.

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[–] PassingThrough@lemmy.world 39 points 5 months ago (6 children)

I recommend Dockge over Portainer if you want a web admin panel. https://github.com/louislam/dockge

It’s basically docker compose in a website, and you can just decide one day to turn it off and use the compose files directly. No proprietary databases or other weirdness.

[–] RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Seconded, have been using it for a while and its simple and great!

[–] TedZanzibar@feddit.uk 4 points 5 months ago

Thirded. It's helped me a lot with picking up the compose syntax, to the point that I'm now comfortable combining disparate services into their own stacks. And I can spin something up from an example compose in less than a minute.

[–] perishthethought@lemm.ee 4 points 5 months ago

And it will convert a docker run command to a compare file.

And it has a beta feature where you can point it at a second server and it will manage that too.

[–] adam@doomscroll.n8e.dev 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I've not used dockge so it may be great but at least for this case portainer puts all the stack (docker-compose) files on disk. It's very easy to grab them if the app is unavailable.

I use a single Portainer service to manage 5 servers, 3 local and 2 VPS. I didn't have to relearn anything beyond my management tool of choice (compose, swarm, k8s etc)

[–] qaz@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

It doesn't seem to have the webhooks functionality that Portainer has though.

[–] Nibodhika@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

That's the one I use exactly because of that. I know compose, not going to learn another program to do the same, just want something that gives me an easier way to edit them than sshing into my box and using an editor.

[–] fjordbasa@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

It also works in the “other” direction- if you’re already using compose files, you can point dockge to their existing location (stacks directory) and it will scan and pick them up!

[–] synae@lemmy.sdf.org 18 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

Never heard of dockStarter so I'm gonna say yes

Compose is good for getting started, and might be sufficient for a long time. Eventually I moved to k8s but I also use that for work so it was an easy move for me.

[–] Mora@pawb.social 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I just started working with k8s (OpenShift). I don't see myself switching my private setup to k8s. How long did it take you to be comfortable with it that you made that decision?

[–] synae@lemmy.sdf.org 2 points 5 months ago

I started learning k8s about 5 years ago, and in about 8 months I was ready to setup k3s at home and manage everything with ArgoCD.

Approximately 3 years ago I set up a second cluster on digital ocean and moved some workloads to that, including ArgoCD which manages both the remote DO cluster and the home k3s cluster

[–] Auli@twit.social 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

@synae @Mountain_Mike_420 your using K8s at home isn't that overkill.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 8 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If you're learning in any kind of professional capacity, you may want to get familiar with running things on k8s. I would never deploy Compose in any kind of production environment.

[–] peregus@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I would never deploy Compose in any kind of production environment.

May I ask you why?

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Aside from the myriad issues it has on its own, the easiest answer is: it doesn't scale on multiple machines and instances.

Example: I have 10 services in a compose file, and I need each service to scale independently across multiple servers. Which is easier, more reproducible, and reliable: controlling the docker compose state across many instances, or communicating with a central management service with one command to do it all for me?

[–] mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

What you need then is swarm compose, that can run any service in global mode (in all nodes all the time) or scale mode.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No, then you're just orchestrating the service level stuff, and nothing else. Docker's tools will never compare to cluster scaling efforts where the entire horizontal layer to be scaled can be orchestrated from the instance up to containers.

[–] mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

not sure I understand you, in docker swarm your containers are started on n number of works from a single compose file on a manager. you can add any number of work nodes to scale your service as needed

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

N number of EXISTING nodes. Proper container orchestration platforms handle all the provisioning of instances, scaling of services, IAM...etc.

Docker Swarm (and all Docker tools) only handle...Docker.

Swarm is another thing I would never recommend in production.

[–] mhzawadi@lemmy.horwood.cloud 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's not container orchestration, that's infrastructure orchestration. Depending on your use case docker swarm could just the right tool for the job.

You've been using Aws and they will happily let you add more nodes to your container runner of choice

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

No, it's container orchestration. As-in "I orchestrate all the scaling needed to run and scale the containers".

[–] towerful@programming.dev 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Sure, but what you are describing is the problem that k8s solves.
I've run plenty of production things from docker compose. Auto scaling hasn't been a requirement, and HA was built into the application (so 2 separate VMs running the compose stack). Docker was perfect for it, and k8s would've been a sledgehammer.

[–] just_another_person@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

K8s isn't the only container orchestration platform out there, it's just what is the widely used flavor right now. Any of the micro clusters would still be better than the Docker tools, for a multitude of reasons, and if someone is learning about this right now, they might as well put the effort forth to get familiar.

I've never seen a large scale Compose or Swarm cluster, and wouldn't be working for a team who ran such things. Alternatives would also be: ECS (if on AWS), Openshift, Rancher, and most other cloud platforms have some form of their own that handles provisioning, as well is IAM/RBAC seamless integrations, and other networking integrations for whatever platform.

[–] perishthethought@lemm.ee 7 points 5 months ago

Yah, IMO, if your goal is to learn how to really use and maintain Docker, then you don't want a script getting in the way. Also IMO, DOcker is not that hard to learn (not that I am an expert yet).

[–] brewery@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

I would recommend it as it is fairly easy to understand and most Foss services give you an example to use. You can also convert docker run examples to compose (search docker composeriser) although it doesn't always work.

I found composer files easier when learning it, to digest what is going on (ports, networks, depends_on etc) and can compare with other services to see what is missing (container name, restart schedule etc). I can then easily backup the compose files, env files and data directories to be able to very quickly get a service up again (although DBs are trickier but found a docker image that I can stick on the compose files which backups the DB dumps regularly)

[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

Yes, in an ideal world, you would learn all the tools the software offers so when a third party tool come along you know what problem it is trying to solve.

[–] r_thndr@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 5 months ago

I've been using DockSTARTer for years and it does what I need, when I need it.

If the goal is to learn, then go for learning Docker directly.

If the goal is to do it well and quickly, don't reinvent the wheel.

[–] palitu@aussie.zone 2 points 5 months ago

i used dockStarter for a while, but ultimately moved away from it to roll my own docker-compose. This was a few years ago though.

For me, i always want to make it fit with how i want to run my server, so a lot of the times i wanted to adjust the settings. The other big thing is that I always find services not in the library, so need to learn it anyway.

There is nothing (i dont think) stopping you from doing both!

[–] Decronym@lemmy.decronym.xyz 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
HA Home Assistant automation software
~ High Availability
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
k8s Kubernetes container management package

3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 17 acronyms.

[Thread #781 for this sub, first seen 3rd Jun 2024, 13:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] Petter1@lemm.ee 1 points 5 months ago

Just go for kubernetes

/s