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!

  • jagged_circle@feddit.nlEnglish
    5·
    20 hours ago

    Its an extremely fast and insecure way to setup services. Avoid it unless you want to download and execute malicious code.

      • jagged_circle@feddit.nlEnglish
        2·
        7 hours ago

        Package managers like apt use cryptography to check signatures in everything they download to make sure they aren’t malicious.

        Docket doesn’t do this. They have a system called DCT but its horribly broken (not to mention off by default).

        So when you run docker pull, you can’t trust anything it downloads.

    • festus@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      20 hours ago

      Entirely depends on who’s publishing the image. Many projects publish their own images, in which case you’re running their code regardless.