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!
good answers already so i will give you a different example.
my basic understanding of it is that docker was created originally for developers. im not sure if anyone planned for it to be a way to package up software for end users.
before docker existed you would have this issue where devs would be working on an app, say jellyfin, but each dev might be on a different platform (windows, mac, linux), or be using a different OS version, or different versions of whatever software… which meant it happened often that the app would work for one dev but not another. maybe one dev updated C# to version 2.3 and told everyone else to update, but someone missed the memo and is still running version 2.2 and now jellyfin wont work for them and time would be wasted trying to figure out where the mismatch was
so docker was a way to fix that “version hell” problem. every single thing that is needed for the app to run is kept inside the container. one dev will update something to a new version, then that container is shared to all other devs and each dev only has to worry about updating to the newest container before they start working on something.
app settings are kept in a separate location and the app data in another. in the case of jellyfin, the app data would be the movies or tv shows folder for example. then when you start the docker container, it will symlink those 2 locations/folders inside the container and the jellyfin app can access them as if they were folders that were actually stored inside the container.
so having the settings and data separate like that makes it very easy to update the container to a new version, or for a developer is probably useful being able to rollback to an older container for testing. its similar to how say windows puts the program files in one location and settings in the appdata folder
for end users its handy if theres a new version of jellyfin or whatever that isnt released yet but you want try it out, you can run 2 containers at the same time and both of them can access the same settings and data. (maybe with the newer one in read-only mode so it doesnt mess up your settings or data!)