What to people use and recommend for this? I’ve read a bit about portainer, but I’m still learning - and don’t know what the best solutions are.
Today I have a handful of selfhosted services running on my home machine - mostly installed directly, but a couple running as docker containers. As the scale of my selfhosting has grown, I’ve realized that things would be a lot easier to manage if each service was run as its own container, so that installed services are isolated.
The solution I’m looking for would make it easy (possibly a web UI) for me to monitor, modify, update, and remove containerized services, including networking and storage.
Edit: Also I would only want a FOSS solution.
try NixOS
all your containers and other services will be managed through one re-usable file
if your server is >= 8GB then proxmox gives a nice interface builtin. i use it to make nixos lxc containers in which i run my containers. which does actually make sense
NixOS modules are great when they
If either of these points aren’t fulfilled you will have to spend a lot of time learning the Nix language and then creating and maintaining the modules yourself, which is easier said than done for many services. I eventually moved on to Podman quadlets, and shortly after that I moved from NixOS to Fedora Kinoite.
I’d say you shouldn’t use any system (be it nixos, ansible or even bash scripts) if you are not willing to learn it.
That said, I too find pre-made modules less useful that I initially thought when I got into nixos: unless you want to do very basic stuff, a lot of times it’s easier to just generate whatever scripts/configuration files you need directly (using one of the trivial builders in lib or writing a custom derivation) rather than learning how the corresponding nixos module works.
One could say nixos modules make easy things slightly easier, and hard things much harder (this is adapted - possibly imprecisely - from a quote on ORMs, I think by Joel Spolsky).