Hi! Im new to self hosting. Currently i am running a Jellyfin server on an old laptop. I am very curious to host other things in the future like immich or other services. I see a lot of mention of a program called docker.
search this on The internet I am still Not very clear what it does.
Could someone explain this to me like im stupid? What does it do and why would I need it?
Also what are other services that might be interesting to self host in The future?
Many thanks!
EDIT: Wow! thanks for all the detailed and super quick replies! I've been reading all the comments here and am concluding that (even though I am currently running only one service) it might be interesting to start using Docker to run all (future) services seperately on the server!
You can think of Docker as something that lets you run all of your self-hosted services inside of their own virtual machine. To each service, it looks like that service is running on its own separate computer. (A Docker container is not actually a virtual machine, it's something much faster than that, but I like to think about it the same way. It has similar advantages.)
This has a few advantages. For example, if there is a security vulnerability in one of your services, it's less likely to affect your whole server if that vulnerable service is inside of a Docker container. Even if the vulnerability lets an attacker see files on your system, the only "system" they can see is the one inside of the Docker container. They can't look at anything else on the rest of your actual computer, they can only see the Docker "virtual machine" that you created for that one service.