There are a few things I want to host that are very firmly “docker only” images. I get docker, I understand why it exists but I can’t get into it. I have had docker and portainer running in the past but found it cumbersome (portainer updates were a minor annoyance, and updating docker images seemed “wrong”) but I can’t get away from it.
I happened across CasaOS earlier which sort of looked like something that would help, then looked at alternatives to this and saw someone suggest Cosmo which says it needs installing on docker so I got confused again!
Is there anything that’s truly worth using to make installing/managing/updating docker images simple or is it just more complicated in the long run?
For the record I do have ESXi and countless VMs, I find spinning up a VM simple and it suffices for all my needs apart from a couple of specific things (like a Google Photos replacement). I don’t really want to learn docker just to use Immich!
Personally I’ve been running docker via Unraid for about a year now and while it was easy I had very little understanding of what I was doing beyond following the instructions provided with the templates.
About a month ago my Unraid machine nuked itself and rather than rebuild it as is I decided to take the opportunity to try something new and set up Ubuntu Server on a Raspberry Pi I had lying around and set up docker on it from the ground up. Terminal only. I did install portainer but I’ve only used it for monitoring, and tbh I could probably just shut it down at this point. I learned far more in a week of getting a few containers running than I did over months of running via a web ui. I actually started with pure docker run commands and then moved on to docker compose to get a fuller appreciation of the whole process.
Honestly not knowing yaml won’t hurt you too much. Biggest thing that bites pretty much anyone going in is that yaml absolutely cares about whitespace. Keeping indentation consistent is essential. Once you get a feel for it it’s surprisingly intuitive.