Hi! Im new to self hosting. Currently i am running a Jellyfin server on an old laptop. I am very curious to host other things in the future like immich or other services. I see a lot of mention of a program called docker.
search this on The internet I am still Not very clear what it does.
Could someone explain this to me like im stupid? What does it do and why would I need it?
Also what are other services that might be interesting to self host in The future?
Many thanks!
EDIT: Wow! thanks for all the detailed and super quick replies! I’ve been reading all the comments here and am concluding that (even though I am currently running only one service) it might be interesting to start using Docker to run all (future) services seperately on the server!
There are two ends here, as a user and as a developer. As a user Docker images just work, so you solve almost every problem you’re having which would be your users having them and giving up on using your software.
Then as a developer docker can get complicated, because you need to build a “system” from scratch to run your program. If you’re using an unstable 3d party package or missing packages it means that those problems would be happening in the deploy servers instead of your local machines, and each server would have its own set of problems due to which packages they didn’t have or had the wrong version, and in fixing that for your service you might be breaking other service already running there.