I’m a retired Unix admin. It was my job from the early '90s until the mid '10s. I’ve kept somewhat current ever since by running various machines at home. So far I’ve managed to avoid using Docker at home even though I have a decent understanding of how it works - I stopped being a sysadmin in the mid '10s, I still worked for a technology company and did plenty of “interesting” reading and training.
It seems that more and more stuff that I want to run at home is being delivered as Docker-first and I have to really go out of my way to find a non-Docker install.
I’m thinking it’s no longer a fad and I should invest some time getting comfortable with it?
Don’t learn Docker, learn containers. Docker is merely one of the first runtimes, and a rather shit one at that (it’s a bunch of half-baked projects - container signing as one major example).
Learn Kubernetes, k3s is probably a good place to start. Docker-compose is simply a proprietary and poorly designed version of it. If you know Kubernetes, you’ll quickly be able to pick up docker-compose if you ever need to.
You can use
buildah bud(part of the Podman ecosystem) to build containerfiles (exactly the same thing as dockerfiles without the trademark). Buildah can also be used without containerfiles (your containerfiles simply becomes a script in the language of your choice - e.g. bash), which is far more versatile. Speaking of Podman, if you want to keep things really simple you can manually create a bunch of containers in a pod and then ask Podman to create a set of systemd units for you. Podman supports nearly all of what docker does (with exception to docker’s bjorked signing) and has identical command line syntax. Podman can also host a docker-compatible socket if you need to use it with something that really wants docker.I’m personally a big fan of Podman, but I’m also a fan of anything that isn’t Docker: LXD is another popular runtime, and containerd is (IIRC) the runtime underpinning docker. There’s also firecracker or kubevirt, which go full circle and let you manage tiny VMs like containers.
All that makes sense - except that I’m taking about 1or 2 physical servers at home and my only real motivation for looking into containers at all is that some software I’ve wanted to install recently has shipped as docker compose scripts. If I’m going to ignore their packaging anyway, and massage them into some other container management system, I would be happier just running them of bare metal like I’ve done with everything else forever.