• Dandroid
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      fedilink
      11 year ago

      It’s an amazing software. Just today I needed to spin up a super simple webserver just to share a file with another program who needed to download it via https. Literally one command and I had an Apache server serving an arbitrary folder with a specified SSL certificate for HTTPS. And then one more command to shut it down, and it’s gone. No software to uninstall when I don’t need it anymore. No leftover files (well, the images are cached, but that’s super easy to clear).

      And then just a few hours later, I wanted to test the same program using a samba share instead of https. One command, bam. Sharing the same folder with samba. And then one command and it’s gone.

      And say you want to upgrade your apache version later, you don’t need to worry about if your package manager is pointing to the newest version. You just restart your container with the latest tag and you have the latest version.

      I’m actually rewriting a lot of my services to be in containers. I host a few discord bots for a community that my wife is an admin of. I accidentally updated my server’s version of python once and nuked a few bots (Discord’s API updated and I had to change some code in the new version). I containerized my bots, and now they will always have their own python version independent of my server’s version. And I made sure to specify a version tag rather than using the latest tag, so they will never change. It makes it way easier to make sure it never breaks.