Hi! Question in the title.
I get that its super easy to setup. But its really worthwhile to have something that:
- runs everything as root (not many well built images with proper useranagement it seems)
- you cannot really know which stuff is in the images: you must trust who built it
- lots of mess in the system (mounts, fake networks, rules…)
I always host on bare metal when I can, but sometimes (immich, I look at you!) Seems almost impossible.
I get docker in a work environment, but on self hosted? Is it really worth while? I would like to hear your opinions fellow hosters.
About the root problem, as of now new installs are trying to let the user to run everything as a limited user. And the program is ran as root inside the container so in order to escape from it the attacker would need a double zero day exploit (one for doing rce in the container, one to escape the container)
The alternative to “don’t really know what’s in the image” usually is: “just download this Easy minified and incomprehensible trustmeimtotallynotavirus.sh script and run it as root”. Requires much more trust than a container that you can delete with no traces in literally seconds
If the program that you want to run requires python modules or node modules then it will make much more mess on the system than a container.
Downgrading to a previous version (or a beta preview) of the app you’re running due to bugs it’s trivial, you just change a tag and launch it again. Doing this on bare metal requires to be a terminal guru
Finally, migrating to a new fresh server is just
docker compose down, then rsync to new server, and thendocker compose up -d. And not praying to ten different gods because after three years you forgot how did you install the app in bare metal like that.Docker is perfect for common people like us self hosting at home, the professionals at work use kubernetes