Just curious if Docker brings anything to the table here… I’m not very familiar with Docker
I have a little Optiplex machine [i5-2400 / 8gb ram] that I originally bought to run IIS and MS SQL server on so that I could test deploying code/db’s from my machine to a different ‘server’ machine. Don’t really use it for that now; might int he future. Currently it’s running a Minecraft server for me and my kids. Thinking about also hosting a Terraria server on it, and maybe a Mumble server.
Not a beefy machine with a lot of resources, so I’m not trying to go over the top and run everything on it.
Should I just stick to installing and running things normally on the machine? Is Docker just adding unnecessary complexity?
Depending on what distro you’re using you might want to uninstall their version of docker and side-load the latest docker-ce directly. Some distro ship pretty outdated versions.
Docker for the home user is basically another packaging format, like deb, rpm, flatpak, snap, etc. So for each application I would go with a native deb or rpm if it is available for your distro, then try docker, flatpak, snap etc, then if none of those are available build from source. Building from source is not terrible, but updates are manual and can take a long time, and getting dependencies is sometimes no fun.
If you end up using docker, I would recommend also using docker-compose. It makes updates a one liner, and documents what options and arguments you used for each container.
I see very little point in running something like nginx in docker, but there are other things that it makes sense to.
For trying out ‘production stuff’ it might be useful. I have a couple of dbs installed in docker containers. They are not setup like you would in production, but on the offchance you need them it is very easy to get pretty much any DB running with docker.
I dont see much of a point for something like minecraft servers. But some databases like mongodb are just faster to get running with docker and easier to get rid off again.
Most more permanent things I tend to make work without docker, but docker is great for trying things out and for compatibility reasons. If your program needs something either very new, very old, or esotheric to run on your OS. It might be better to box it away into a container than doing weird modifications to your host OS.