The thing is, those poor design decisions have nothing to do with those features, i claim that every feature could be implemented without “holding the compose files hostage”.

Yes, this is exactly my point. I think I’ve laid out very clearly how Portainer’s shortcomings are far more than just “It’s not for your use case.”

Portainer is designed, from the ground up to trap you in an ecosystem. The choices they made aren’t because it’s necessary to do those things that way in order to be a usable Docker GUI. It’s solely because they do not want you to be able to easily move away from their platform once you’re on it.

Not the point. If you want to interact with the compose files directly through the command line they’re all squirelled away in a deep nest of folders, and Portainer throws a hissy fit when you touch them. Dockge has no such issues, it’s quite happy for you to switch back and forth between command line and GUI interaction as you see fit.

It’s both intensely frustrating whenever it comes up as an issue directly, and speaks to a problem with Portainer’s underlying philosophy.

Dockge was built as a tool to help you; it understands that it’s role is to be useful, and to get the fuck out of the way when its not being useful.

Portainer was built as a product. It wants to take over your entire environment and make you completely dependent on it. It never wants you to interact with your stacks through any other means and it gets very upset if you do.

I used Portainer for years, both in my homelab and in production environments. Trust me, I’ve tried to work around its shortcomings, but there’s no good solution to a program like Portainer other than not using it.

Please don’t use Portainer.

• It kidnaps your compose files and stores them all in its own grubby little lair
• It makes it basically impossible to interact with docker from the command line once it has its claws into your setup
• It treats console output - like error messages - as an annoyance, showing a brief snippet on the screen for 0.3 seconds before throwing the whole message in the shredder.

If you want a GUI, Dockge is fantastic. It plays nice with your existing setup, it does a much better job of actually helping out when you’ve screwed up your compose file, it converts run commands to compose files for you, and it gets the fuck out of the way when you decide to ignore it and use the command line anyway, because it respects your choices and understands that it’s here to help your workflow, not to direct your workflow.

Edit to add: A great partner for Dockge is Dozzle, which gives you a nice unified view for logs and performance data for your stacks.

I also want to note that both Dockge and Dozzle are primarily designed for homelab environments and home users. If we’re talking professional, large scale usage, especially docker swarms and the like, you really need to get comfortable with the CLI. If you absolutely must have a GUI in an environment like that, Portainer is your only option, but it’s still not one I can recommend.

So noble. So majestic. SO STUBBY.

The reasonable way to approach this problem would have been to ask a follow up question, rather than bitching at someone for not answer in the exact format you required. You’re the beggar here, you get zero fucking say in how much or how little people choose to help you.

Intensely so. What the actual fuck?

Y’know, it never stops being exciting when you get to watch someone become one of today’s lucky 10,000.

@/u/caboose12000, I’ll add that the author is Alan Moore. The book is a masterpiece and absolutely worth reading. He also wrote V For Vendetta and honestly too many other increxible works to try to list here.

There’s no backend server to do the transcoding in this case. Kodi can access raw NFS/SMB file shares the same as accessing local storage, so it’s just reading the file over the network, the same as if you were playing it in VLC on your PC.

They wanted to make it closed source again

Certain domain names are locally routed only. So if you use internal or local as a tld, you can just assign whatever names you want and your computer won’t go looking out on the internet for them. This means you and I can both have fileserver.local as an address on our respective network without conflicting. It’s the URI equivalent of 192.168.0.0/16.

Tim Walz seems like what would have happened if Mr Rogers went into politics.

I’ll see about digging up recommendations if I can, but I’m on my phone right now.

My biggest single piece of advice would be this: Understand that your reader does not share your context.

What this means is that you have to question your assumptions. Ask yourself, is this something everyone knows, or something only I know? Is this something that’s an accepted standard, or is it simply my personal default? If it is an accepted standard, how widely can I assume that accepted standard is known?

A really common example of this in self-hosting is poorly documented Docker instructions. A lot of projects suffer from either a lack of instructions for Docker deployment, because they assume that anyone deploying the project has spent 200 hours learning the specifics of chroot and namespaces and can build their own OCI runtime from scratch, or needlessly precise Docker instructions built around one hyper-specific deployment method that completely break when you try to use them in a slightly different context.

A particularly important element of this is explaining the choices you’re making as you make them. For example a lot of self-hosted projects will include a compose file, but will refuse to in any way discuss what elements are required, and what elements are customisable. Someone who knows enough about Docker, and has lots of other detailed knowledge about the Linux file system, networking, etc, can generally puzzle it out for themselves, but most people aren’t going to be coming in with that kind of knowledge. The problem is that programmers do have that knowledge, and as the Xkcd comic says, even when they try to compensate for it they still vastly overestimate how much everyone else knows.

OK, I said I’d try for examples later, but while writing this one did come to mind. Haugene’s transmission-openvpn container implementation has absolutely incredible documentation. Like, this is top tier, absolutely how to do it; https://haugene.github.io/docker-transmission-openvpn/

Starts off with a section that every doc should include; what this does and how it does it. Then goes into specific steps, with, wonder of wonders, notes on what assumptions they’ve made and what things you might want to change. And then, most importantly, detailed instructions on every single configuration option, what it does, and how to set it correctly, including a written example for every single option. Absolutely beautiful. Making docs like this is more work, for sure, but it makes your project - even something like this that’s just implementing other people’s apps in a container - a thousand times more usable.

(I’ve focused on docker in all my examples here, but all of this applies to non-containerized apps too)

I write technical documentation and training materials as part of my job, and the state of most open source documentation makes me want to stab people with an ice pick.

Xpipe has rapidly become an essential part of my day to day workflow. I wish I could get it to play nice with MobaXTerm as I prefer that to any of the supported terminals, but that’s really my only gripe. In every other regard it’s just an excellent toolkit for managing remote devices.

It’s not so much that Dockge shows more, and more that it does more. Log viewing in Dockge is actually pretty bad; it’s honestly the one thing that really needs more work. But Dockge is a full management plane; it allows you to deploy, modify, bring up and bring down entire compose stacks. Dozzle is only a log viewer, nothing else. Given that log viewing is the one thing Dockge does badly, they’re actually a perfect complement to each other, and I’d strongly recommend running both.

OK, so right now you’re mounting the remote shares as user moose, but then you tried to chown those folders to user $USER. In case you don’t know this, the $ sign indicates a variable; the command is actually subbing in the name of the user who ran the command.

Now the question here is, what user is radarr / sonarr running under? If you’re running them directly on your machine without docker, that’s probably being set by a systemd task that runs the programs in startup.

You need to make sure that that user has the ability to write to those media folders. The simplest way to do this would probably be to edit the systemd units to run the arr programs as moose, since that’s apparently an unprivileged user you created just for mounting the shares.

Yes, you will need a tuner card or USB tuner. The go to apps are mythtv and Kodi. I’d start with Kodi and see if that does the job for you. If you check the Kodi wiki you’ll find resources on what specific tuner cards work best.

Self hosted DVRs are definitely a dying breed, but there’s stuff out there if you’re willing to dig.

For Jellyfin integration, once you have the files you should be able to dump them out to a folder where Jellyfin can scan them.

I bought a “lifetime premium” for something like $30 USD I think

Same

But use Airsonic instead, it’s a fork that’s free in both the beer and speech sense.

There’s also Navidrome, which is a unique backend, but works with existing Subsonic clients. Check out both, see which one you like better.

If someone has the resources to simulate a universe, they probably have the resources to stimulate an arbitrarily large number of universes. This also assumes that any civilisation within the stimulated universe reaches the level of technological advancement required to make a universe level simulation. We’re talking, probably, whole networks of Matrioska Brains, that sort of thing.