I’m planning to use my Pi for a few small services and nothing else. Currently it has my VPN and apcupsd installed directly, and I want to add Grafana, Prometheus and Uptime Kuma to it.
I was going to install Docker to use the last three, but ultimately, is it really needed? I won’t be using the system for anything other than these purposes, and I just plan to set them up then almost never touch it again. Once it’s set up I’m cloning the SD card too, so I don’t need the centralized folder structure of Docker either.
And I’m already using Docker pretty heavilly on another server, so I don’t need another environment to learn on either.
So with all that, is it worth installing Docker on my Pi to run these services? Or should I save a small amount of storage and processing power by just installing them direct to the system?
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My Pi runs ubuntu 22.04 and docker with portainer, watchtower, adguardhome and tailscale
If you’re already familiar with it and can maybe even reuse some compose files, it’s definitely worth it. Even on a Pi.
It is up to you. Using Docker makes it easier for administration and evolution, but bare metal is sufficient if you are comfortable with it (which every self-hoster should be).
I use Docker on my Pi for one simple reason: management. While it’s true that some services are set and forget, there will be times when you will need to check on a particular service’s health, and Docker makes it a little easier by having each service on it’s own environment. You can restart every service individually with ease, and even nuke something if needed without wrecking the whole system.
I use Portainer, and everything on Docker inside it.
i recently got my first raspberry pi and have a drupal website which consists of three docker container. not sure how it’ll handle high traffic but so far it works like a charme.
Yes. Using docker is not like running your services inside VMs. It’s a pretty lightweight way of structuring your services, with the host kernel shared by all instances.
I run everything in Docker on my RPi 4 and it works very well.
I just installed paperless-ngx on my Pi with Docker. I read the instructions on doing it bare metal and thought “Nope!” So yeah, it can save you some work.