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!

  • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    1·
    12 hours ago

    containers should be immutable and not be able to write to their internal filesystem

    This doesn’t jive with my understanding. Containers cannot write to the image. The image is immutable. However, a running container can write to its filesystem, but those changes are ephemeral, and will disappear if the container stops.