I’m planning to use my Pi for a few small services and nothing else. Currently it has my VPN and apcupsd installed directly, and I want to add Grafana, Prometheus and Uptime Kuma to it.
I was going to install Docker to use the last three, but ultimately, is it really needed? I won’t be using the system for anything other than these purposes, and I just plan to set them up then almost never touch it again. Once it’s set up I’m cloning the SD card too, so I don’t need the centralized folder structure of Docker either.
And I’m already using Docker pretty heavilly on another server, so I don’t need another environment to learn on either.
So with all that, is it worth installing Docker on my Pi to run these services? Or should I save a small amount of storage and processing power by just installing them direct to the system?
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My Pi runs ubuntu 22.04 and docker with portainer, watchtower, adguardhome and tailscale
I use Docker on my Pi for one simple reason: management. While it’s true that some services are set and forget, there will be times when you will need to check on a particular service’s health, and Docker makes it a little easier by having each service on it’s own environment. You can restart every service individually with ease, and even nuke something if needed without wrecking the whole system.
I use Portainer, and everything on Docker inside it.
i recently got my first raspberry pi and have a drupal website which consists of three docker container. not sure how it’ll handle high traffic but so far it works like a charme.
Yes. Using docker is not like running your services inside VMs. It’s a pretty lightweight way of structuring your services, with the host kernel shared by all instances.
I run everything in Docker on my RPi 4 and it works very well.
If you’re already familiar with it and can maybe even reuse some compose files, it’s definitely worth it. Even on a Pi.
It is up to you. Using Docker makes it easier for administration and evolution, but bare metal is sufficient if you are comfortable with it (which every self-hoster should be).
I just installed paperless-ngx on my Pi with Docker. I read the instructions on doing it bare metal and thought “Nope!” So yeah, it can save you some work.