flabberghaster wrote on January 18, 2025 at 4:46 PM

Reply to comment by twovests in Thank you to Postmill for offering production-ready Docker containers by twovests

I do think containers are a bandaid for having too many dependencies or a workaround for people who don't want to make their software easy to deploy. Like you shouldn't have to ship an entire inner OS with runtime and everything, it should just compile and run. Sometimes that's not feasible for valid reasons, but often it's a way to get away with having a bad release process or having your software too complicated to set up.

twovests OP wrote on January 18, 2025 at 5:01 PM

a bandaid for having too many dependencies or a workaround for people who don't want to make their software easy to deploy

I'd be curious to ask this; what could someone using a LAMP-like stack do to improve on things? I kind of thought that dependency problems were inherent to this kind of stack.

E.g. Postmill uses Postgres and PHP. Short of rewriting the PHP part in Rust or Go (which is an extreme length but would produce a mostly-static binary), or using another isolation tool like AppImage or Flatpak, I don't know any way it could be easier to deploy.

I really am asking from curiosity-- I moved to Docker because of frustration with LAMP-likes. (Shaking my fist at Nextcloud)

flabberghaster wrote on January 18, 2025 at 5:15 PM

this is assuming the only thing the server is running is linux apache mysql and php; but you'd just write your PHP code and create a package like an RPM or what have you, that deploys it to the right place, and your configs for the rest of things would also either be their own packages, or managed by some script or puppet.

It all depends i guess. I suppose it probably is much easier to manage if you just compose some images, than if you say "you gotta configure the machine" because if you can abstract away much of that stuff into containers then you're not stuck on one distro of linux, so i get why people use docker (which I call dorker btw).