Doctor Docker (or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Tolerate the Container”)

Backstory: I’ve been either paying for or using 3rd part apps for Read-It-Later (Pocket), Hosted Bookmarks (Raindrop.io) and an RSS Feedreader (Inoreader) for about a year. In the interest of 1) teaching myself Docker and 2) decoupling from hosted solutions I have finally replaced all three of the above apps with docker containers.

I am using Portainer to manage my docker nodes (I have two) and containers. I recommend learning at least the basics on how to build and modify containers via the command line before using a GUI tool to manage them, but Portainer came highly recommended and abstracts a lot of the drudgery into simple point and clicks.

I’ve replaced Pocket with Wallabag, Inoreader with FreshRSS and Raindrop.io with Linkding. As expected, the self-hosted solutions may not match the paid apps feature-for-feature but in each case the concessions were features I didn’t use anyway or things I am able to do without.

I am just starting to realize the ease and potential of rolling out solutions via docker. Combined with Nginx Proxy Manager (also a docker “stack“) I’ve been able to roll out internet-accessible apps from my homelab, complete with Let’s Encrypt SSL certs for any app I want to access from anywhere.

I am still hand-writing shell scripts to deal with backing up persistent data and trying to force some sort of organization onto my system (it gets hard to keep track of things when you can roll out and destroy an ElasticSearch stack in a few minutes) but it’s getting better.

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