Selfhosted

Because it’s “quick start”. Least effort to get a taste of it. For actual deployment I would use compose as well.

Many project also have a example docker-compose.yml in the repository if you dig not so deep into it

There is https://www.composerize.com to convert run command to compose. Works ~80% of the time.

I honestly don’t understand why anyone would make “curl and bash” the officially installation method these days, with docker around. Unless this is the ONLY thing you install on the system, so many things can go wrong.

you don't have to decode anything.. just throw it in here :

https://www.composerize.com

Plain docker is useful when running some simple containers, or even one-off things. A lot of people thing about containers as long running services, but there's also many containers that are for running essentially a single command to completion and then shuts down.

There's also alternate ways to handle containers, for example Podman is typically used with systemd services as unlike Docker it doesn't work through a persistent daemon, so the configuration goes to a service.

I typically skip the docker-compose for simple containers, and turn to compose for either containers with loads of arguments or multi-container things.

Also switching between Docker and Podman depending on the machine and needs.

I used docker run when I first started, I think it's a fairly easy entry point that "just works".

However I would never really go back to it, since compose is a lot tighter and offers a better sense of overview and control

I don't think you're out of touch, just use docker compose. It's not that hard to conver the docker run example command line into a neat docker-compose.yml, if they don't already provide one for you. So much better than just running containers manually.

Also, you should always understand what any command or docker compose file does before you run it! And don't blindly curl | bash either, download the bash script and look at it first.

I've started replacing my docker compose files with pure ansible that is the equivilent of doing docker run. My ansible playbooks look almost exactly like my compose file but they can also create folders, set config files or cycle services when configs are updated.

It's been a bit of a learning process but it's replaced a lot what was previously documentation with code instead.

I too am endlessly frustrated by documentation that lacks compose file examples.

Fortunately, this exists: Docker Compose Generator

Ive almost completely moved to podman managed by systemd and I highly recommend it.

Personally, I do usually want the docker run command. Much easier to use when orchestrating the deployment with other tools.

For readability, I just line-break the command after each argument...

I prefer to use ansible to define and provision my containers (docker/podman over containerd). For work, of course k8s and helm takes the cake. no reason to run k8s for personal self hosting, though.

Docker-compose is a orchestration tool that wraps around the inbuilt docker functions that are exposed like "docker run", when teaching people a tool you generally explain the base functions of the tool and then explain wrappers around that tool in terms of the functions you've already learned.

Similarly when you have a standalone container you generally provide the information to get the container running in terms of base docker, not an orchestration tool... unless the container must be used alongside other containers, then orchestration config is often provided.

Honestly I never really saw the point of it, just seems like another dependency. The compose file and the docket run commands have almost the same info. I'd rather jump to kubectl and skip compose entirely. I'd like to see a tool that can convert between these 3 formats for you. As for piping into bash, no - I'd only do it on a very trusted package.

I’m curious to hear from the runners. I use compose and I feel the same, it’s more readable and editable and it allows me to backup the command by backing up the docker-compose.yml

I always use docker-compose. It is very handy if you ever want to have a good backup or move the whole server to another. Copy over files -> docker compose up -d and you are done For beginners, they should use docker compose from the start. Easier than docker run

If you ever want to convert those one-liner to a proper .yml then use this converter

I am not using docker-compose personally, and moving away from it at work, because it is only a CLI client and doesn't integrate with other tools except she'll scripts.

First version of my server, I wrote a bunch of custom shell scripts to execute docker run statements to launch all my containers b/c I didn't know docker at all and didn't want to learn compose.

Current version of my server, I use docker compose. But all the containers I use come from linuxserver.io, and they always give examples for both. I use ansible to deploy everything.

Even for the one-liner argument - a better one liner than any docker run is docker compose up [-d].

Something that always confused me was how docker doesn’t come with compose installed as a core component.

Totally agree. I need to then pick apart the run command to make the docker compose file, then get something wrong and need to do a search.

I use docker to test individual container images. Anything long running is getting a Kubernetes manifest. I never use docker compose, except when supporting developers.

Previously my server was just a Debian box where I had a 'docker' directory with a bunch of .sh files containing 'docker run' commands (and a couple of docker-compose files for services that that have closely related containers). That works really well, it's easy to understand and manage. I had nginx running natively to expose stuff as necessary.

Recently I decided to try TrueNAS Scale (I wanted more reliable storage for my media library, which is large enough to be annoying to replace when a simple drive fails), and I'm still trying to figure it out. It's kind of a pain in the ass for running containers since the documentation is garbage. The web interface is kind of nice (other than constantly logging me out), but the learning curve for charts and exposing services has been tough, and it seems that ZFS is just a bad choice for Docker.

I was attracted to the idea of being able to run my services on my NAS server as one appliance, but it's feeling like TrueNAS Scale is way too complicated for home-scale (and way too primitive for commercial, not entirely sure what market they are aiming for) and I'm considering dumping it and setting up two servers, one for NAS and for running my containers and VMs.

it turns out GPT converts plain docker commands into docker compose files well enough to me, it's been my go-to when I need to create a compose YAML. Checking a YAML and making one or two small corrections is even faster than entering all info in a form like Docker Compose Generator.