I jumped into Docker feet first a few months ago and have not had a real good time with it. Networking doesn’t make sense, I can’t ever seem to access config files without dropping to su -, all the tutorials and videos I find are pretty top level and assume the user already has a firm grasp on it. It’s great for drop in stuff like open speed test and Vaultwarden but I recently tried setting up dashy and I can’t even find the config files to edit. The Dashy documentation says the easiest way to edit the configs is to use code-server, so I spun up a code-server VM and can’t even get it to open the files because the web based VSC doesn’t allow for SSH editing. There’s nothing explained in the documentation beyond that.

Yes I’m frustrated but I’m not bitching as if these solutions are trash, I’m simply asking where can I go to learn this shit from the ground up? It doesn’t make any sense to me from the perspective that I’ve approached it. Networking seems to be silly and weird, entering an interactive TTY to the container seems to be useless as there’s no package manager and doesn’t seem to have vim, nano, or any native way to edit configs. It’s been extremely frustrating so I ask you, where can I learn what I’m doing wrong and how to properly work with Docker?

  • unscholarly_source@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Portainer is definitely useful (I use it on a daily basis), but probably a bad place to start…

    I started with the following progression:

    1. Docker CLI
    2. Docker-Compose
    3. Writing my own scripts to build and manage docker-compose configs (purely optional and skippable)
    4. Portainer
    5. Purely optional, but in a professional setting, kubernetes and various container orchestration tools.

    Good luck in your journey!

    • dartanjinn@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      12·
      1 year ago

      Docker-compose got it done. Once I learned about Volumes and using compose to pass in volumes from other instances I was able to pass in a directory with a custom yaml to the Dashy container then pass the same directory into the code-server container and both are working as I expected they should. Compose and volumes were the missing pieces. I also learned that stacks is how to use compose in Portainer. Not sure why they felt the need to change the naming but it works.

      • unscholarly_source@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        That is AWESOME! Congrats!

        Yes that’s right, portainer stacks equate to compose… I might be wrong, but I remember reading somewhere a while back that they (and other container orchestration tools) were not permitted to reference “Docker” or its products (including compose) due to legal and licensing restrictions by Docker.

        Not to the level of Reddit, but Docker has its fair share of questionable business decisions.