Though I love docker and containerization, most of my infrastructure is still hosted on Virtual Machines via Proxmox. This has some obvious drawbacks like slower (re-)starting times, the use of more ressources due to the virtualized kernel & emulated hardware and harder automation of the deployment process.

That’s why I finally got myself to migrating my infrastructure over as well as discovering some new sysyems while exploring docker.

I will document the whole procedure with all it’s obstacles on this page, while starting with the basic and easy ones to warm up and then coming to more complex subjects, like storage sharing with Nextcloud and Syncthing.

Starting out with the basics
Portainer management UI
Reverse Proxy & Let’s Encrypt certs
Dashboard: DashMachine
Documentation: Bookstack, Docusaurus, etc.
[OpenBooks & other trivia (server-stuff.md)]()
Media Server: Jellyfin & Sabnzbd
[Storage: Nextcloud & Syncthing]()
[Security: SingleSignOn, Authelia, Teleport]()

Basics

First and foremost I will be using Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Server as my host system. But in most cases - as we’ll be working inside the Docker environment - this should not matter. Also note that Docker commands have always to be executed with root privileges. A bunch of available images can be found at https://hub.docker.com.

Helpfull through the setup will also be: - https://dbtechreviews.com/blog/ - https://www.the-digital-life.com/ - https://docs.technotim.live/

Install Docker and Docker-compose

$ sudo apt install docker.io docker-compose

Portainer management UI Deployment official docs

# docker volume create portainer_data

# 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:2.11.1

-> Go to https://<IP>:9443

Portainer UI

As much as I love the command line, Portainer is a great web interface for Docker, which also allows introducing systems and containerization concepts to less advanced linux sysadmins. Unfortunately (at least at the time of writing …) there are barely templates for a Portainer docker-compose file online, but at least it’s not too hard to build it ourselves, as there are only a few lines of configuration needed.

# mkdir /mnt/portainer/ && cd /mnt/portainer/ && vim docker-compose.yml && docker-compose up -d

version: "3.5"
services:
  jellyfin:
    image: portainer/portainer-ce
    container_name: portainer
    ports:
      - 8000:8000
      - 9443:9443
    network_mode: "host"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - ./portainer_data:/data
    restart: unless-stopped

Reverse Proxy

NGNIX Proxy Manager

Eventually later on I will go with Caddy, Traeffic or HAProxy. But for now let’s start with NGNIX Proxy Manager. (-> official docs)

# mkdir /mnt/reverse-proxy/ && cd /mnt/reverse-proxy/ && vim docker-compose.yml && docker-compose up -d

version: '3'
services:
  app:
    image: 'jc21/nginx-proxy-manager'
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - '80:80'
      - '81:81'
      - '443:443'
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
      - ./letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt

-> Go to http://<IP>:81 and create Proxy Hosts with config and SSL-certificates.

Dashboard

Personally, I found DashMachine by far best suited for my use case but there are dozens of options available e.g. on https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#personal-dashboards

(https://dbtechreviews.com/2020/03/how-to-install-dashmachine-dashboard-on-docker-and-omv5/)

# mkdir /mnt/dashmachine/ && cd /mnt/dashmachine/ && vim docker-compose.yml && docker-compose up -d

---
version: "3"
services:
  dashmachine:
    image: rmountjoy/dashmachine
    container_name: dashmachine
    volumes:
      - ./config:/dashmachine/dashmachine/user_data
    ports:
      - 5000:5000
    restart: unless-stopped

-> Go to http://<IP>:5000 and start customizing your dashboard

Looks amazing, right! :)

Documentation

BookStack

For that one I’m constantly hopping between multiple Markdown plattforms as well as some traditional documentation systems like MediaWiki. This time lets go with the multi-functional, easy-to-use platform BookStack.

# mkdir /mnt/bookstack/ && cd /mnt/bookstack/ && vim docker-compose.yml && docker-compose up -d

---
version: "2"
services:
  bookstack:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/bookstack
    container_name: bookstack
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - APP_URL=
      - DB_HOST=bookstack_db
      - DB_USER=bookstack
      - DB_PASS=<yourdbpass>
      - DB_DATABASE=bookstack
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
    ports:
      - 6875:80
      - 6877:443
    restart: unless-stopped
    depends_on:
      - bookstack_db
  bookstack_db:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/mariadb
    container_name: bookstack_db
    environment:
      - PUID=1000
      - PGID=1000
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=<yourdbpass>
      - TZ=Europe/Berlin
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=bookstack
      - MYSQL_USER=bookstack
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=<mysqlrootpass>
    volumes:
      - ./dbconfig:/config
    restart: unless-stopped

How to migrate an old BookStack instance over is described here, after getting into the container interactively by running docker run -it --entrypoint /bin/bash <container_name>. -> Go to https://<IP>:6877

Trivia, having a bit fun

As the UniFi controller is not too urgent for me and I stumbled across some other interesting projects, let’s try out a few …

OpenBooks

This is quite a niche project, but with the great goal to simplify the download process of media - as it’s name implies mainly for books - from the IRC Highway. As I’m a passionate reader and love discovering new books, this seemed pretty appealing.

Of course, I don’t encourage anyone to download pirated media of the web and I want to strongly emphasize the advantage of buying books in a regional store and thus supporting the authors, who hardly earn any money from selling books.

Anyways, for the project itself (at least till now) it seems well maintained and got it’s last update only five months ago. On their Githup page you can find the official docker instructions but be sure to remove the environment:-section from the given docker-compose file (or eventually adapt the /openbooks/ path to ./; haven’t tried this yet).

# mkdir /mnt/openbooks/ && cd /mnt/openbooks/ && vim docker-compose.yml && docker-compose up -d

version: '3.3'
services:
    openbooks:
        ports:
            - '8085:80'
        volumes:
            - './booksVolume:/books'
        restart: unless-stopped
        container_name: OpenBooks
        command: --persist
        image: evanbuss/openbooks

volumes:
    booksVolume:

-> Go to https://<IP>:8085 to access the WebUI

Media Server

Jellyfin

There are loads of different media server solutions for organizing and streaming your media content. Ultimately Emby was my choice, but it comes with the price of not beeing open-source. As this is an absolute exclusion criterion for me, I therefore have to view it as pure garbage. Lukely there is a volunteer-built, privacy-friendly & open-source fork of it, called Jellyfin.

That’s what I use for two years and I’m happily fine with. So let’s try to get it up and running in a docker container.

version: "3.5"
services:
  jellyfin:
    image: jellyfin/jellyfin
    container_name: jellyfin
    environment:
      - TZ=Europe/Berlin
    ports:
      - 8920:8920
      - 8096:8096
    network_mode: "host"
    volumes:
      - ./config:/config
      - ./cache:/cache
      - ./media:/media
    restart: unless-stopped

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