A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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My file server is also the container/VM host. It does NAS duties while containers/VMs do the other services.
OPNsense is its own box because I prefer to separate it for security reasons.
Pihole is on its own RPi because that was easier to setup. I might move that functionality to the AdGuard plugin on OPNsense.
Obviously, you host your own hypervisor on own or rented bare metal.
@kiol I mean, I use both. If something has a Debian package and is well-maintained, I'll happily use that. For example, prosody is packaged nicely, there's no need for a container there. I also don't want to upgrade to the latest version all the time. Or Dovecot, which just had a nasty cache bug in the latest version that allows people to view other peoples' mailboxes. Since I'm still on Debian 12 on my mail server, I remain unaffected and I can let the bugs be shaken out before I upgrade.
I have a single micro itx htpc/media server/nas in my bedroom. Why use containers?
I would always run proxmox to set up docker VMs.
I found Talos Linux, which is a dedicated distro for kubernetes. Which aligned with my desire to learn k8s.
It was great. I ran it as bare-metal on a 3 node cluster. I learned a lot, I got my project complete, everything went fine.
I will use Talos Linux again.
However next time, I'm running proxmox with 2 VMs per node - 3 talos control VMs and 3 talos worker VMs.
I imagine running 6 servers with Talos is the way to go. Running them hyperconverged was a massive pain. Separating control plane and data/worker plane (or whatever it is) makes sense - it's the way k8s is designed.
It wasn't the hardware that had issues, but various workloads. And being able to restart or wipe a control node or a worker node would've made things so much easier.
Also, why wouldn't I run proxmox?
Overhead is minimal, get nice overview, get a nice UI, and I get snapshots and backups
Containerisation is all the rage, but in reality it’s not needed at all for all but a tiny number of self hosters. If a native program option exists, it’s generally just easier and more performant to use that.
Docker and the like shine when you’re frequently deploying and destroying. If you’re doing that with your home server you’re doing it very wrong.
I like docker, I use it on my server, but I am more and more switching back to native apps. There’s just zero advantage to running most things in docker.
For me it's lack of understanding usually. I haven't sat down and really learned what docker is/does. And when I tried to use it once I ended up with errors (thankfully they all seemed contained by the docker) but I just haven't gotten around to looking more into than seeing suggestions to install say Pihole in it. Pretty sure I installed Pihole outside of one. Jellyfin outside, copyparty outside, and I something else im forgetting at the moment.
I was thinking of installing a chat app in one, but I put off that project because I got busy at work and it's not something I normally use.
I guess I just haven't been forced to see the upsides yet. But am always wanting to learn
containerisation is to applications as virtual machines are to hardware.
VMs share the same CPU, memory, and storage on the same host.
Containers share the same binaries in an OS.
When you say binaries do you mean locally stored directories kind of like what Lutris or Steam would do for a Windows game. (Create a fake c:\ )
Not so much a fake one but overlay the actual directory with specific needed files for that container.
Take the Linux lib directory. It exists on the host and had python version 3.12 installed. Your docker container may need python 3.14 so an overlay directory is created that redirects calls to /lib/python to /lib/python3.14 instead of the regular symlinked /lib/python3.12.
So let's say I theoretically wanted to move a docker container to another device or maybe if I were re-installing an OS or moving to another distro, could I in theory drag my local docker container to an external and throw my device in a lake and pull that container off into the new device? If so .. what then, I link the startups, or is there a "docker config" where they are all able to be linked and I can tell it which ones to launch on OS launch, User launch, delay or what not?
For ease of moving containers between hosts I would use a docker-compose.yaml to set how you want storage shared, what ports to present to the host, what environment variables your application wants. Using Wordpress as an example this would be your starting point
https://github.com/docker/awesome-compose/blob/master/wordpress-mysql/compose.yaml
all the settings for the database is listed under the db heading. You would have your actual database files stored in /home/user/Wordpress/db_data and you would link /home/user/Wordpress/db_data to /var/lib/MySQL inside the container with the line
volumes:
- db_data:/var/lib/mysql
As the compose file will also be in home/user/Wordpress/ you can drop the common path.
That way if you wanted to change hosts just copy the /home/user/Wordpress folder to the new server and run docker compose up -d and boom, your server is up. No need to faf about.
Containers by design are suppose to be temporary and the runtime data is recreated each time the container is launched. The persistent data is all you should care for.
TrueNAS is on bare metal has I have a dedicated NAS machine that's not doing everything else and also is not recommended to virtualize. Not sure if that counts.
Same for the firewall (opnsense) since it is it's own machine.
Your phrasing of the question implies a poor understanding. There's nothing preventing you from running containers on bare metal.
My colo setup is a mix of classical and podman systemd units running on bare metal, combined with a little nginx for the domain and tls termination.
I think you're actually asking why folks would use bare metal instead of cloud and here's the truth. You're paying for that resiliency even if you don't need it which means that renting the cloud stuff is incredibly expensive. Most people can probably get away with a$10 vps, but the aws meme of needing 5 app servers, an rds and a load balancer to run WordPress has rotted people. My server that I paid a few grand for on eBay would cost me about as much monthly to rent from aws. I've stuffed it full of flash with enough redundancy to lose half of it before going into colo for replacement. I paid a bit upfront but I am set on capacity for another half decade plus, my costs are otherwise fixed.
Your phrasing of the question implies poor understanding.
Your phrasing of the answer implies poor understanding. The question was why bare metal vs containers/VMs.
I'm selfhosting Forgejo and i don't really see the benefit of migrating to a container, i can easily install and update it via the package manager so what benefit does containerization give?
I thought about running something like proxmox, but everything is too pooled, too specialized, or proxmox doesn't provide the packages I want to use.
Just went with arch as the host OS and firejail or lxc any processes i want contained.
I've never installed a package on proxmox.
I've BARELY interacted with CLI on proxmox (I have a script that creates a nice Debian VM template, and occasionally having to really kill a VM).
What would you install on proxmox?!
Firmware update utilities, host OS file system encryption packages, HBA management tools, temperature monitoring, and then a lot of the packages had bugs that were resolved with newer versions, but proxmox only provided old versions.
Depends on the application for me. For Mastodon, I want to allow 12K character posts, more than 4 poll question choices, and custom themes. Can't do it with Docker containers. For Peertube, Mobilizon, and Peertube, I use Docker containers.
Why could you not have that Mastodon setup in containers? Sounds normal afaik
I’ll chime in: simplicity. It's much easier to keep a few patches that apply to local OS builds: I use Nix, so my Mastodon microVM config just has an extra patch line. If there's a new Mastodon update, the patch most probably will work for it too.
Yes, I could build my own Docker container, but you can’t easily build it with a patch (for Mastodon specifically, you need to patch js pre-minification). It's doable, but it's quite annoying. And then you need to keep track of upstream and update your Dockerfile with new versions.
I'm running a TrueNAS server on bare metal with a handful of hard drives. I have virtualized it in the past, but meh, I'm also using TrueNAS's internal features to host a jellyfin server and a couple of other easy to deploy containers.
So Truenas itself is running your containers?
Yeah, the more recent versions basically have a form of Docker as part of its setup.
I believe it's now running on Debian instead of free BSD, which probably simplified the containers set up.
I'm doing this on a couple of machines. Only running NFS, Plex (looking at a Jellyfin migration soon), Home Assistant, LibreNMS and some really small other stuff. Not using VMs or LXC due to low-end hardware (pi and older tiny pc). Not using containers due to lack of experience with it and a little discomfort with the central daemon model of Docker, running containers built by people I don't know.
The migration path I'm working on for myself is changing to Podman quadlets for rootless, more isolation between containers, and the benefits of management and updates via Systemd. So far my testing for that migration has been slow due to other projects. I'll probably get it rolling on Debian 13 soon.