Banging Together Services Like a Caveman in My Home Server

Feeling lazy? Portainer is too hard to spell? Pick up your club and beat Docker until you have a Home Server.

Last year I set up my home server (bloody details here ), mostly for Jellyfin and Transmission (and those two are definitely not related). They were defined in a single compose yaml and that was all. That setup is still basically the same, but I made some minor changes for more satisfaction.

In the future I plan to define every service that I would like to run on my Home Server (or Servers) in this compose yaml. So, modularity is preferred. For my utmost pleasure, profiles can be defined in the compose file. I give two profiles for every service: the first is its name, and the second is its purpose, so by purpose, multiple services can be grouped.

docker compose --profile media up -d --remove-orphans

Above is an example for starting all services under the media profile in detached mode, while removing containers that are no longer defined in the compose file (or removing children without parents, I’m not sure).

I also contemplated using multiple compose files, but I want to stretch this setup as far as it’s viable. Just for fun. Yes, this is fun.

Another issue I wanted to resolve was that all the volumes were in different places, so backing them up would have been a pain. Now, all volumes are collected under /docker/volumes/.

A simplified example:

services:
  jellyfin:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/jellyfin:10.10.7
    container_name: jellyfin
    volumes:
      - /docker/volumes/jellyfin/config:/config
      - /docker/volumes/media:/data/media
    ports:
      - 8096:8096
    profiles:
      - jellyfin
      - media
  transmission:
    image: lscr.io/linuxserver/transmission:4.0.6
    container_name: transmission
    env_file: .env
    volumes:
      - /docker/volumes/transmission/config:/config
      - /docker/volumes/media:/downloads/complete
      - /docker/volumes/pending:/downloads/incomplete
    ports:
      - 9091:9091
      - 51413:51413/udp
    profiles:
      - transmission
      - media

I also had to move the old volumes to the new place. Moving multiple hundreds of gigabytes of data can be time consuming, so I highly recommend rsync in these cases. It’s usually used for copying between machines, but it’s great for local copying as well. It’s faster, can be resumed, and has really nice output if you want to stare at characters on a computer screen for 20 minutes. (I don’t know how long it took, I left the computer and went outside. You should try it.)

And of course, a party is not a party without a Makefile, so I collected the commonly used commands into one. In this example, the start target can run with or without the profile argument: make start or make start profile=media, so only the desired services will start.

DC_EXISTS := $(shell docker compose > /dev/null 2>&1 ; echo $$?)

ifeq ($(DC_EXISTS),0)
    DOCKER_COMPOSE = docker compose
else
    DOCKER_COMPOSE = docker-compose
endif

start:
    @if [ ! -f .env ]; then \
        echo "ERROR: .env file not found. Check .env.example"; \
        exit 1; \
    fi

    @if [ -z "$(profile)" ]; then \
        $(DOCKER_COMPOSE) --profile "*" up -d --remove-orphans; \
    else \
        $(DOCKER_COMPOSE) --profile "$(profile)" up -d --remove-orphans; \
    fi

So that’s all, easy peasy. Thank you for reading this ode to primitivity. And I don’t know why I’m still considering docker-compose, it’s not the 15th century…