yeah docker is a pretty good option. worth trying out. just don’t randomly deploy community images from dockerhub like a dumbass. tons of them were created by people who demonstrably dont know what the fuck they are doing. but if you stick to official images, and make your own when there aren’t any official images, you’ll be fine.

Definitely. I cant imagine the pain of non-isolated services fucking each other up on my root os. damn. You should check out caprover.

I’d personally recommend putting your provisioning steps for each service into Ansible playbooks. That way, you can spin them all up from zero any time, distribute them across different hosts, in vms or lxc containers, any way you like.

For me the main selling point of docker is spinning up a stable version of a container and it pulls all its dependencies which are also working. Installing things directly on the OS, at least for me, is a war of “run service; lib XX not found; apt install XX; run service; can’t write to /foo/bar;” etc etc

In your case, I’d have a docker compose with all my services, and would just say docker compose up and pronto.

Maybe I would go a small step further and go for rootless Podman.

Use docker on arch. It is perfectly fine for one server. The need for release based distributions strictly comes only when managing many servers where updates should be unattended.

I never used containers, K8s etc and built my server all from scratch using debian.

This year I switched to a hypervisor and use the proxmox supplied lxc containers.

Never without again. The convenience of spin a new one up, fiddle around without messing up the main sys, doing snapshots to clear some mess if needed makes selfhost so much easier.

No matter what software you use I would say containers.

Make an Arch container with everything?

I use Arch, btw.

I’m going to assume everyone here saying use docker is fully conversant with docker already. As someone who already happily has multiple services hosted on multiple (extremely light) VMs I would say just leave docker alone. I have spend most of today trying to get some containers in docker working (reliably, which is what a lot of people miss). Yes getting docker up and running and containers working is simple, but if it all goes sideways tomorrow what are you going to do? What’s your backup plan? IME it’s much harder to get a docker stack back up and running using your own data than simply restoring a backup to a VM host. There are a couple of things I want to use that are docker only and there is something to trip you up at every turn. It’s another level of complexity you don’t need. If you have a working environment now then why would you need to add docker?

The only thing I would say would be to maybe use a different distro for hosting everything on, but overall “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”.

is it worth learning docker and deploying all my services that way or should I just continue with the way i have been doing it for years now?

100% worth!

It is really amazing approach that eases so many aspects and makes you feel more in control and more willing to try stuff.

This repository should be helpful.

Examples of bunch of popular services running in docker and some other stuff like backups with borg or kopia.

using Arch for my home server

I too run Arch as my go-to linux server, usually docker host is being its main job. Sometimes wireguard node or NUT sever for UPS.

Reason being its a damn good OS and I am most comfortable with it since I am running it on my main desktop. But another thing is that I usually run under some hypervisor(hyper-v and esxi) as a virtual machine, not straight on metal. So taking snapshot of it is matter of second and reverting to that snapshot is a minute… so that is one aspect that lets me go with any linux I damn like without that much consideration for reputation of stability.

That repo that I linked has even notes on arch fresh install, but arch started to include archinstall script on ISO, i decided to rather use that.

I started to deploy Arch so much that I even have few ansible playbooks to get arch the way I like. Which mostly means some basic services and packages and workflow being about nnn file manager and micro text editor.

Also recommend you use lts kernel when installing arch, just for that extra stability.

Also it seem you were running xorg too, which I recommend abandoning. So much extra packages, so much more that can go wrong on update compared to bare arch with terminal and ssh… but if it really ease your workflow then fine.

I just run Arch on my server and spin up whatever docker containers I need.

I agree with others and have an alternative view. How about you install a hypervisor like Proxmox and then you get the flexibility of running Docker, LXC containers or even VMs.

Personally, I run a mix of LXC containers and Docker. Why? I really like Docker but the all inclusive nature of the containers can make customization of settings difficult.

In contrast, LXCs are heavier than Docker containers but they act like a full Linux machine and so you can use all of your past system admin knowledge and customize away. They are mich lighter than a VM and so they are a nice middle ground.

Summary for simple self-contained apps, I use Docker and for more complex apps, I rely on LXC containers. With Proxmox you can easily use both and so it is the best of both worlds!

Arch for desktop and Debian for servers

While I really like arch, I don’t think it’s a good distro to be running apps directly on due to the rolling release nature. It’s better to run apps directly in a distro like Debian or alpine. Yes, running the apps in a container will bring more stability and reliability, but you’re still risking botched updates to the host that could cause instability.

That being said, your immediate best move would be to use docker. Your best move long term is to move to a distribution thats not rolling release.