I've been a professional in the industry for over a decade and I've still not found any meaningful benefit for learning or using containerization in the real world. I just install my dependencies with good old fashioned version managers (asdf) and I develop the project. I ignore all docker documentation, and everything works fine. When I try to use containers to develop, it's seemingly two dozen gotchas that sum up to my IDE needing endless configuration to function properly. I don't get it.
What's a good alternative if I want to self host and convenience?
I have some hobby sites I host on a VM and currently I use docker-compose mainly because it's so "easy" to just ssh into the machine and run something like "git pull && docker-compose up" and I can have whatever services + reverse proxy running.
If I were to sum up the requirements it would be to run one command, either it succeeds or fails in it's entirety, minimal to no risk of messing up the env during deployment.
Nix seems interesting but I don't know how it compares (yet to take a good look at it).
I don't know, that set of requirements sounds like containers are a good fit. I don't have an alternative for you. I would just ssh into the server and run the commands needed to update/start the services; it wouldn't be one command and it is not impossible to mess up.
I will say that consuming other people's services that I don't intend to develop on is easier with containers. I use podman for my jellyfin and Minecraft servers based on someone else's configs. My only issue with them is the complexity during development.
I have some hobby sites I host on a raspberry pi and currently I use make mainly because it's so "easy" to just ssh into the machine and run something like "pip install thing.whl && sudo systemctl restart thing" and I can have whatever services + reverse proxy running.
Curious what you build/work on? If you're only shipping software library or tools, then yeah, your perspective makes sense - `asdf` or `mise` seem superior to `devcontainer`s. But I wouldn't want to deploy a web application without Dockerizing it.
Mostly web applications actually. Most web stuff is not that complicated. Usually the deployment itself is from docker (ops insists) but I just do development without it and I've never had a problem. I understand in theory I could get mismatched versions of things from production and thereby introduce a bug; in practice this has never happened a single time.
Right, yeah - I'm specifically _not_ talking about development (I agree that the likelihood of mismatches causing bugs is so small as to be worth fixing as that arises, rather than wasting effort on building a containerized dev environment), but about deployment. How could you deploy without first containerizing your application?
