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?
You must log in or register to comment.
My Pi runs ubuntu 22.04 and docker with portainer, watchtower, adguardhome and tailscale
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.
If you’re already familiar with it and can maybe even reuse some compose files, it’s definitely worth it. Even on a Pi.
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.