I mean you could just use docker and if all you want is a plex container, it may be the way to go. Kubernetes is definitely a lot to learn if you are kind of hesitant to get started with it in the first place. I would just say that single binary distribution like k0s just basically becomes a docker on steroids when used in a single node environment. I’ve become so familiar with k8s that going back to docker feels like a massive downgrade for anything but a simple and straightforward task (which a single plex container, admittedly is).

Just do yourself a favour and if you go that route, at least use docker-compose to template your container. Searching through your bash history to find the command you used to start the container is just a recipe for frustration waiting to happen.

One major feature that k8s has which docker doesn’t (I mean, there are lots tbh) is the ability to use helm charts. These are basically install templates, if you don’t like the defaults then you can provide your own (assuming the chart author has written good charts) and the helm chart will template your values into the default chart and spin up a bespoke version for you.

For instance, a theoretical helm chart whose purpose is to install qbittorrent would likely provide the following:

• the manifest to run a version of qbittorrent
• a cluster IP to expose the plex web port internally
• an “ingress” object to connect your nginx frontend to the qbittorrent web port so that you can go to mydomain.com/qbittorrent and qbittorrent appears
• a volume mount to store your data in

However, say this ingress by default doesn’t use SSL, but you want to ensure you’re using https when you enter the password on your web interface, but the rest of the chart defaults meet your needs – then a well written chart would allow you to provide values that let you template the SSL setup for the ingress object and provide for cert-manager to go and provision some certificates for your provided hostname with Let’s Encrypt.

Helm charts basically are a way to provide a sane set of defaults which can be extended and customized to personal needs.

k8s (or the lightweight cousins) may not be ideal for you and, as I said, I’m biased because I’m a certified k8s admin, so tinkering with k8s resembles something like fun for me. Your mileage may vary :)

Terms:

• batteries: this isn’t a kubernetes term, just a figure of speech. You got a new toy and it came with batteries – you didn’t have to supply them yourself. The batteries were included (i.e. the installation was opinionated and came with a pre-existing notion of how you should use the application). I wrote that last comment from my phone, so I may have misused the term in an attempt to get a response written on my phone
• pod: a collection of containers running in tandem – for instance, if you had nginx and plex running in the same pod, then plex can find nginx ports as if they were sharing the same machine (127.0.0.1 is the same for both containers). If you had nginx and plex running in different pods, then you would need to use a service to allow them to communicate with each other (which they could easily do with the cluster’s dns service)
• manifest: a yaml file containing the spec of your containers (name, container port, image to use, volumes to mount). This would basically equate to a docker compose file, but manifests can also define services, namespaces, volumes, etc. In that regard a manifest is a yaml file that defines an object in kubernetes
• nodeport: a type of service. This one will direct traffic to a given pod and potentially open that service to external services. By default nodeports are given in the 30000-32767 range and will bind to the hosts network interface. The result is that the service becomes available on a port externally. The other service type is clusterip which only assigns an IP which can be accessed internally (i.e. by other pods/services in your cluster – for instance if you had a mysql service you wanted to expose to a web/application pod but not let the world access it, then clusterIP lets you do this). The final service type is loadbalancer which is a bit more complicated (TLDR, these are frequently integrated with cloud providers to automatically spin up actual load balancer objects, for instance, at AWS, but can also be used to bind services to privileged ports on your external IP while leveraging something like “MetalLB”)

I run unraid on my homelab with 3 VMs and 12 docker containers and having the fewer abstractions the better. I have no complaints with unraid but went with it over TrueNAS since I have mismatched disk sizes.

I also run TrueNAS for my lukewarm backup server for unraid and 1 extra mount and have no complaints but scales’ jails and kubernetes backend for docker seemed not a great fit for what I wanted but I’m sure others love and would prefer that setup.