It’s kinda nice and sometimes janky.
Been a while since I’ve posted here. Haven’t been inactive though. I’ve been playing with using Docker containers and learning how those operate and migrating some of my low power apps to use those instead of a dedicated virtual machine. It has its pros and cons but overall is super efficient.
Being new to Docker and any containerization platform in general, I opted to use Portainer, a dashboard of sorts for managing instances of several containers. Makes the whole process easier and able to be done in a browser vs CLI. If I had to do it again in the future however, I may forgo the usage of Portainer as having done this for a while has made this much easier to understand and can save some resources if needed. After getting Docker and Portainer setup I chose to go with NGINX Proxy Manager, or NPM for short, as my first project.
I had NPM setup on its own dedicated VM previously as it was simpler to manage but in learning how to use docker I opted to move it to there to see how well it would perform. It performs great so far. Setup was the same and arguably simpler thanks to resources like DockerHub where most projects with a Docker container live, making it easier to pull down projects for quicker use. Overall setting up NPM was a breeze. Updating is just as easy as well as I just tear down the container and restart it. As long as I have the option to pull new Docker on start, it’ll check for an updated project before starting.
Docker and Home Assistant
Later on I tried to use Home Assistant, HA for short, as a container but it had its issues. Installing it and getting it configured was pretty smooth but that’s where it stops. In order to use the Zigbee radio I had, a Conbee 2, I had to use DeConz Community to communicate with my Zigbee lights, a mix of Phillips Hue and Sengled. Which isn’t a problem. I had to deploy another container with Deconz and configure it. I had to pass the USB radio through into the Docker VM with ESXi, then within that image pass the USB device through to the container. no problem. Except the DeConz software never found it. Eventually it was recognized and I could use my lights with HA after seemingly doing nothing to fix it except try about 15 times to get the lights to be detected. Fast forward a few weeks and they don’t work. The radio apparently dropped from the container and couldn’t find it again. Followed all the steps and could not figure it out. Made sure it was passed to the VM, ran lsusb in the terminal and verified it was detected, double checked the environment variables for the container to ensure the radio was passed through properly. Nothing worked. I opted to use the Home Assistant OS instead. Flawless experience with 0 problems so far and is running to this day. Been about 2 months now.
Future Plans for Docker
Even though Docker is great for low effort applications, I wouldn’t put anything intensive on it. Or really anything that stores data. NPM, an instance of SearxNG and my Heimdall dashboard are about as far as I’m willing to go with it. I’ve had some storage problems with the Virtual Machine and even though I added 200GB to it, it still seems to run through it. Not sure whats eating the drive but nothing in Ubuntu seems to know either. As such, I had SearxNG stop working while I fixed it the first time and am expecting it to fail again. At which point I may teardown the image and use dedicated VM’s again. Could be user error, could be a fault in the setup, who knows.
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