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!
It’s not. Imagine Immich required library X to be at Y version, but another service on the server requires it to be at Z version. That will be a PitA to maintain, not to mention that getting a service to run at all can be difficult due to a multitude of reasons in which your system is different from the one where it was developed so it might just not work because it makes certain assumptions about where certain stuff will be or what APIs are available.
Docker eliminates all of those issues because it’s a reproducible environment, so if it runs on one system it runs on another. There’s a lot of value in that, and I’m not sure which resource you think is being wasted, but docker is almost seamless without not much overhead, where you won’t feel it even on a raspberry pi zero.