I jumped into Docker feet first a few months ago and have not had a real good time with it. Networking doesn’t make sense, I can’t ever seem to access config files without dropping to su -, all the tutorials and videos I find are pretty top level and assume the user already has a firm grasp on it. It’s great for drop in stuff like open speed test and Vaultwarden but I recently tried setting up dashy and I can’t even find the config files to edit. The Dashy documentation says the easiest way to edit the configs is to use code-server, so I spun up a code-server VM and can’t even get it to open the files because the web based VSC doesn’t allow for SSH editing. There’s nothing explained in the documentation beyond that.
Yes I’m frustrated but I’m not bitching as if these solutions are trash, I’m simply asking where can I go to learn this shit from the ground up? It doesn’t make any sense to me from the perspective that I’ve approached it. Networking seems to be silly and weird, entering an interactive TTY to the container seems to be useless as there’s no package manager and doesn’t seem to have vim, nano, or any native way to edit configs. It’s been extremely frustrating so I ask you, where can I learn what I’m doing wrong and how to properly work with Docker?
I started learning docker first by how to customize an image. Since Alpine Linux is a popular light weight distro, I started with customizing it and moved from there. I also explored other people’s Dockerfiles to see how to use a Dockerfile to customize an image to containerize an app.
I found almost every YouTube howto on the subject matter very frustrating and often making the assumptions that you note. I also read the reference documentation on docker’s website. It’s not easy and it’s time consuming. I’d say I am good enough to be dangerous, not much more than that. Mostly, I’ve modified other people’s images to suite my needs
Thanks I’ll look into that. It doesn’t help that my introduction to Docker was using portainer so I haven’t really had much experience in the terminal outside of docker ps. I really put the cart before the horse there and am regretting it.
Hey, it’s okay. I’ve been there and done that myself. You’ll find it useful to look at both Dockerfile and docker-compose.yml files. A mistake I made early on was thinking I could replace a Dockerfile with a docker-compose.yml one. The Dockerfile itself describes how an image should be built. The docker-compose.yml file describes the environment and fetches images. It also may pass variables to the Dockerfile.
A suggestion of mine would be to learn docker-compose. It’s basically the docker command line in a file which is easily modifiable, can deploy extremely easy, etc.