After a few years of meticulously maintaining a large shell script that setup my Fedora home server, finally got around to containerizing a good portion of it thanks to the fine team at linuxserver.io.

As the software set I tried to maintain grew, there were a few challenges with dependencies and I ended up having to install/compile a few software titles myself, which I generally try to avoid at all costs (since that means I’m on the hook for regularly checking for security updates, addressing compatibility issues with OS upgrades, etc).

After getting my docker-compose file right, it’s been wonderful - a simple docker-compose pull updates everything and a small systemd service keeps the docker images running at boot. Mapped volumes mean none of the data is outside my host, and I can also use the host networking mode for images that I want auto-discovery for (e.g. Plex or SMB).

Plus, seeing as I’ve implemented docker-compose as a systemd service, I am able depend on zfs-keyvault to ensure that any dependent filesystem are mounted and available. Hurray!

You check out a sample config for my setup in this GitHub gist.