My Setup Pt. 2

Raw docker compose files are nice and all, but they’re not all that great for reproducability all things considered.

Yes, docker compose is great and it works, but it only works once you already got your server to a point where it has docker and docker compose installed, your server configured, etc. and once you have a couple services you have to manage several docker compose files, and configuration files and folders for each of those services.

Eventually, a single docker compose up -d starts to not be enough, as you now have to ensure proper ordering between the containers, configure some of them to be on the same network, give them names… Putting that information into more compose files just doesn’t feel as nice for me, because at that point each compose file no longer fully encapsulates a container/service, it needs to know about the environment it will run in outside the compose file. At this point, what is the purpose of these files being separate? What benefit is there to keeping a dozen separate configuration files that each have to know about the others’ internals? In my opinion, none.

No, I would instead prefer to put all of that configuration into a singular file. A shell script serves me better in that case.

Well, you can throw all containers into a singular compose file. However this brings its own problems, as now the file is a gigantic mess. Not really as elegant as I would like.

Point is, the containers are easy to reproduce, deploy and use. However, (and this might seem a little like a gourmet going “this wine just doesn’t have the flavour I want” while talking about a really expensive bottle of wine) I would really prefer to be able to manage all these services from a single file, and I would really enjoy being able to automate setting up and maintaining a server.

I recently learned about ansible. Ansible is, in some ways, exactly what I wanted. Easy, simple way to automate maintanence on one or more servers - exactly what I want.

I now use Ansible’s containers.podman.podman_container to start containers, containers.podman.podman_pod to put all those containers into a pod (for containers that are easily grouped, like those that serve web pages and such). As ansible abstracts away much of the issues of managing a linux server, these operations will generally work regardless of whatever distro the server happens to be running.

I have an ansible playbook to start everything I want started on the server, one to backup data, and one to restore backups. I could literally replace my current server within minutes, and honestly I have to say that feels great. I mean, in practice, I shouldn’t need to do that very often. But I CAN.

Anyway, today’s post is a short one. I want to post more often, but if I try to make every post 200 lines of markdown long I’ll probably post like twice a year. I’d rather post a little more often :)

Have a nice day.