My notes on running containerized web services on a home server
avikdas.com
I set up a new home server recently using containerized services, and I wanted to share what I learned. Nothing here is revolutionary, but this is the type of resource I wish I had when I started.
I'm open to feedback on what I could have done better!
Great post, thanks for sharing 👍
I would suggest to give Ansible a try, it would make it really easy to deploy a new service with all required users and config.
That's a great point about Ansible. Compose automates most of the setup, but automating all of it would be amazing. I'll try it with the next service I set up, and if it goes well, I'll document it. Thanks for the suggestion!
Do you do some sort of versioning/snapshotting of your services? I'm on the compose route as well, and have one btrfs subvolume per service that holds the compose.yml and all bind-mounted folders for perstistent data. That again gets regularly snapshotted by snapper.
What leaves me a bit astounded is, that nobody seems to version the containers they are running. But without that, rolling back if something breaks might become a game of guessing the correct container version. I started building a tool that snapshots a service, then rewrites the
image:in compose.yml to reflect what ever the current:latesttag resolves to. Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be an off-the-shelf solution for that...How do you do that? I'm building a similar system now that automatically updates my containers. I've played around with the API and I can see which versions are attached to the latest sha265, but I can't find a way to automatically tell which version it is. Especially when the same sha is linked to multiple versions
I only keep track of the sha256, compose happily uses those. I published the tool https://feddit.de/post/2909288 :)
Ah ok. I thought you meant the numbered version. I'm doing the same with sha256 too.
I don't do a great job of this, but take Immich for example. There, I specify the version in the compose.yml (technically, the version is in the .env file and substituted into the compose.yml). At that point, updating Immich is a matter of updating the version number and restarting the service.
These configuration files are all managed with git, so when I do these updates, I create a new commit. I just checked, and I have Forgejo pinned to a specific version in its compose.yml as well. But unfortunately, the other services are referencing
:latest. I'm going to go back and pin them all :)I built a small tool that does that for me now and published it: https://feddit.de/post/2909288 maybe you'll find it useful, no guarantee that it doesn't break something though :D
I would recommend using Ansible to manage your containers and infrastructure in general. It has quite a steep learning curve, but it's worth it!
Great suggestion! Someone else also suggested Ansible, so I'll try it for the next service I set up. If it works out, I'll publish another post on my experience :)
I am saving this post for the future, informative! Thanks!
Great read, thanks for sharing
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 11 acronyms.
[Thread #76 for this sub, first seen 23rd Aug 2023, 18:55] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Getting address not found.