this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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What is Docker? (lemmynsfw.com)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

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!

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[–] [email protected] 93 points 1 week ago (30 children)

A program isn't just a program: in order to work properly, the context in which it runs — system libraries, configuration files, other programs it might need to help it such as databases or web servers, etc. — needs to be correct. Getting that stuff figured out well enough that end users can easily get it working on random different Linux distributions with arbitrary other software installed is hard, so developers eventually resorted to getting it working on their one (virtual) machine and then just (virtually) shipping that whole machine.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Docker is not a virtual machine, it's a fancy wrapper around chroot

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (2 children)

No, chroot is kind of its own thing

It is just a kernel namespace

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

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

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