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!
a chroot is different, but it’s an easy way to get an idea of what docker is:
it also contains all the libraries and binaries that reference each other, such that if you call commands they use the structure of the chroot
this is far more relevant to a basic understanding of what docker does than explaining kernel namespaces. once you have the knowledge of “shipping around applications including dependencies”, then you can delve into isolation and other kinds of virtualisation