I installed a few different distros, landed on Cinnamon Mint. I’m not a tech dummy, but I feel I’m in over my head.
I installed Docker in the terminal (two things I’m not familiar with) but I can’t find it anywhere. Googled some stuff, tried to run stuff, and… I dunno.
I’m TRYING to learn docker so I can set up audiobookshelf and Sonarr with Sabnzbd.
Once it’s installed in the terminal, how the hell do I find docker so I can start playing with it?
Is there a Linux for people who are deeply entrenched in how Windows works? I’m not above googling command lines that I can copy and paste but I’ve spent HOURS trying to figure this out and have gotten no where…
Thanks! Sorry if this is the wrong place for this
EDIT : holy moly. I posted this and went to bed. Didn’t quite realize the hornets nest I was going to kick. THANK YOU to everyone who has and is about to comment. It tells you how much traction I usually get because I usually answer every response on lemmy and the former. For this one I don’t think I’ll be able to do it.
I’ve got a few little ones so time to sit and work on this is tough (thus 5h last night after they were in bed) but I’m going to start picking at all your suggestions (and anyone else who contributes as well)
Thank you so much everyone! I think windows has taught me to be very visually reliant and yelling into the abyss that is the terminal is a whole different beast - but I’m willing to give it a go!
TBH I’ve been using Linux for over a decade, can install & set up Arch from scratch etc. and I still don’t understand Docker.
Docker’s hard. I never really got my head around it. I used “Swizzin Community Edition” to setup my media server. It was really easy compared to Docker-based solutions.
I strongly suggest that you install portainer if this is your first time playing with docker.
It’ll make your life and learning curve dramatically easier.
I’m not suggesting you dont learn how to do it all over CLI (I actually think CLI is way easier and faster to deploy once you get the hang of it), but if you’re looking to deploy something right away, I believe portainer is your best bet.
This. I had the same issue, and just about every tutorial focuses on the command line, and I get why… It’s way more powerful and actually becomes the standard that people who are using docker repeatedly would need to learn.
That being said, this was my first foray into containerizing things since VMware became a thing. So I needed a UI that felt familiar and helped me understand some of the Dockers specific settings and configurations. This was a godsend in helping me get things up and running, and then later I had to learn how to do it properly with docker compose.
For what it’s worth, I still keep my portainer instance running, and use it for some administration stuff like resets, but I think it helps smooth my learning curve. Docker via the command line exclusively pretty much requires you to understand all of the notions and concepts involved.
That’s exactly right. I run UnRaid as my NAS, and not a single docker has been installed from their app store. I also still have Portainer running (at this point I have no idea why anymore, since I haven’t used it in over a year) and it barely uses any resources. Portainer was my first shot at docker containers, and I’ll always be grateful to the developers. I doubt I would have continued learning Docker if Portainer had not existed.
To be fair, you’re taking on a lot of new things at once. You can spin up docker containers on windows too, all while using a UI. I think it’s great your exposing yourself to self hosting, linux, command line interface, and containerization all at once, but don’t beat yourself up for it taking longer than expected. A lot of it takes time. I encourage you to keep trying and playing. Good luck!
There is docker desktop on Linux too.
sudo apt install docker flatpak -y # add flathub if not already there flatpak install dockerEdit: please use Podman. And if you think about Virtualbox, please use Virt-manager instead. Both are RedHat products and they are pretty awesome. Podman is more secure and works well for your job, it is letter-for-letter compatible with docker. You can use podman-compose if you need) but that requires to run a daemon which is also possible.
You can use Podman with many container sources natively, while docker only allows dockerhub. Says enough.
Not recommended as for one it is proprietary and two its more confusing to have tons of buttons than it is to write a docker compose.
I mean I would recommend them to use Podman. Docker on Linux Mint was a mess last time I used it.
Why?
It seems like podman would be way harder as you need to configure systemd and manage containers yourself.
With docker compose you apply it and docker creates the containers you need.
I dont know if you still need an external repo for docker, podman is in the system repo.
When using Containers it works the same. Yes systemd stuff may be manual thats what Podman Desktop is probably for.
Its more secure, more free and when learning it new anyways, why not the better tool?
Podman is not really a replacement for docker. It is its own separate thing and it has trade offs with docker.
The reason I use podman on my local machine and for Jellyfin is that it is darn fast. It makes docker look like a emulator by comparison. With that being said the issue with podman is mostly permission related. However, it also has some instability in cases where a container malfunctions. This often is happens when you try to stop and start a container at the same time.
Once that happens the runtime effectively locks up as the system is in a state that it doesn’t know how to handle.
Some of the benefits of docker include its ability to recover from just about anything. If you need a container to always be available docker can do that. It also can do on the fly patching and self healing.
Docker compose is very nice to have for larger software with multiple containers. I can write a docker compose that builds and deploys my nodejs applications with a database back end and it will just work without any issues. Deploy it and you are good.
Thanks for the info, I have little personal experience especially with compose.
How is podman compose after setting it up?
Sudo docker will do the trick. Docker does some networking shit so it needs admin privileges
Don’t give up, don’t listen to goober 🤓 itt telling you to read manpages that shit is worthless.
Better yet, add yourself to the Docker group. You shouldn’t have to Sudo it
AI can be of great help when learning docker, as it is genuinely super confusing. You don’t “find” docker, it’s a terminal program that you interact with… From the terminal.
I’m gonna get A LOT of hate for this, but check out Warp terminal. It has a really nice GUI for configuration and really nice autocomplete for commands.
Why should you get hate for the warp terminal? I’ve never used it but it looks quite nice.
@llii @Presi300 It was made for apple users and evidently so (it’s basically #alacritty and #tmux but closed source, cloud-based and with some AI bullcrap on top of it)
Ok, this isn’t for me than.
I mean, you can call literally any more advanced terminal “alacritty with tmux”, but I don’t think that’s fair. And I for one find Warp’s AI features fairly useful. It’s also as I mentioned above got a really nice autocomplete and configuration UI. (It’s autocomplete is an absolute godsent when it comes to dealing with docker…)
I would enjoy training a LLM on my aggregated command history and using that for auto completion, or maybe using an open source one trained on a larger set from the community, but I am very uncomfortable sending data about every command (as I’m writing it!) to any company.
Because it’s closed source and requires a sign in. Imo worth it, as it’s a very nice terminal.
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Oh, that’s a no from me then.
Apt install docker.io
docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9443:9443 --name portainer --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer-ce:latest
Go to IP:8000 and now you can build docker compose stacks. A far easier way to learn docker.
one of my portainer instances completely broke a few months ago because of a failed db migration after an update. i’ve been using dockge ever since and i’m happy with it. it stores every stack you deploy as a docker-compose file on your regular filesystem, so if it ever breaks you can just edit the files instead
Oh that is nice. Yeah I tend not to use portainer nowadays but when I was learning docker it was a godsend. I’ll look into dockge though :)
I never tried dockage, but portainer also stores all docker-compose on filesystem (probably at
var/lib/docker/volumes/portainer_data/_data/compose). You can also use “backup” button in GUI to download everything in single tar.gz archive. Folder structure is not the best, but its not hard to figure out. I’m not saying portainer is better though
OP this is the answer but Ill provide simple steps in case this is not clear enough:
- Install docker
- Install docker-compose
- Install portainer (command from the post above)
- open Portainer GUI in browser using IP:8000 (from here you can do everything in GUI)
- go to stacks and create a new stack
- edit docker-compose for audiobookshelf - modify folder paths for volumes (example - change
./audiobooks:/audiobooksto/path/to/folder:/audiobooks) - paste that in stack and hit deploy
- go to IP:13378 to open Audiobookshelf GUI
- enjoy
OP: chatGPT is your personal Linux guru. Pretend it’s your friend who knows everything about linux and tell it what you want to achieve.
Paste in any error messages and it will tell you how to fix them. Just make sure it knows what distro you’re using first.
That’s how I learned to use docker :)
except it makes up so much shit that it’s harmful past extremely noob stuff
Well making mistakes is how you learn stuff. Do all this on a vm that you can blow away and start over when you do screw up. So ChatGPT giving you crap advice can still be very useful. Sometimes the wrong answer can lead you to the right one.
Actually though. I’ve asked it questions about impossible things related to technology and it’s even gone as far to make up things for features that don’t exist.
In one case I asked it once if it was possible to have Kafka partitions shared across topics (currently impossible per design) and it was confidently incorrect, even gave me a made up command line for how to achieve what I asked.
oh i know… i had it write a few very short programs, just about every single line had an error… importing shit that doesn’t exist, adding incorrect arguments to functions…
but what’s scary is it looks ok at a quick glance… and these ai bros with reverse imposter syndrome are going to talk their way into some dangerous situations and break important things, eventually…
but i guess that’s not too different from shitty coders and contractors anyways.
e.g. the original healthcare.gov taking 500 million lines of code
I remember being so lost in the dark when starting docker. There’s 2 main approaches to launching docker containers. One is with CLI arguments and one is from a docker-compose.yml file.
I highly recommend the latter.
Try going to chatGPT and ask it to write a docker compose file for whatever service you’re trying to stand up.
There’s no point in asking ChatGPT for a generic compose, most docker images will recommend a compose that’s specifically written for them.
It is a much better way to run volatile server apps that are changing at breakneck speed.
I don’t mean to be that guy but like did you even read a basic tutorial? Or did it install and the docker commands aren’t working still?
rtft
Once it’s installed in the terminal, how the hell do I find docker so I can start playing with it?
Type
dockerin the terminal, it’s a CLI application.But it sounds like you might want to install Docker Desktop, which does give you a GUI to use.
I can at least assure you that as a developer, docker is annoying to set up and their documentation is confusing.
Most things in Linux are easier to set up but sometimes installing things happens to be harder than it should be and docker is one of them.
You should keep in mind that compared to other OSs, a lot of Linux software is CLI only, so they won’t always show up in the applications list and you’ll need to check if you have it in a terminal.
podman is better but thats just my opinion btw
OP is having trouble with the oldest and most highly documented container system in existence. I don’t think throwing the almost invisible podman into the mix would help anything in the least.
There is lazydocker which gives a visual interface to docker in the terminal window. May be worth looking into.
Docker is professional software and because of that isn’t always the most intuitive thing to use.
The first big thing to get your head around is that there is no GUI. Everything you do to manage docker is through the command line. If you really want to, there’s some third party GUI software for managing Docker, but I haven’t used it in the 2 years I’ve been using Docker.
Once you’ve installed docker, there’s a little bit of setup required to make it run smoothly. The Docker Docs page on Linux post-installation steps has detailed instructions on how to do that and how to run a test container
