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Comment by jandeboevrie | Hacker News Reader

But why would you prefer Docker like this over, for example, running thttpd directly? Saves you a lot of Ram an indirection?

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Run this on a linux host and it isn't that much different from running thttpd directly. There's just some extra chroot, cgroups, etc. setup done before launching the process but none of that gets in the way once it's running. Docker adds a bit of networking complexity and isolation, but even that is easily disabled with a host network CLI flag.

It's really only on windows/mac where docker has significant memory overhead, and that's just because it has to run a little VM with a linux kernel. You'd have the same issue if you tried to run thttpd there too and couldn't find a native mac/windows binary.

For one, because his home server provides multiple utilities, not just this one project, and without docker he starts to have dependency conflicts.

He also like to upgrade that server close to edge, and if that goes south, he want to rebuild and bring his static site up quickly, along with his other projects.

I serve several sites off an AWS EC2 instance, all are dynamic REST endpoints with DBs in their own `tmux` instance. I also have a five line nodeJS process running on another port for just my static page. All of this is redirected from AWS/r53/ELB. The only pain in the arse is setting up all the different ports, but everything runs in its own directory so there are no dependency issues. I've tried to ramp up with docker, but I always end up finding it faster to just hack out a solution like this (plus it saves disk space and memory on my local dev machine). In the end my sol'n is still a hack since every site is on one machine, but these are just sites for my own fun. Perhaps running containers directly would be easier, but I haven't figured out how to deal with disk space (since I upload lots of stuff).

Well in the article he ended up compiling thttpd statically so he wouldn't have dependency conflicts if he ran it directly. Funny how there's overlap in docker solutions that solve different but related issues for non-docker deploys as well...

Without docker, he'd need to install build dependencies on the host. Once it is in docker, why move it out?

I don’t want to touch the root of my server. I rather add a new container that doesn’t modify anything on the root.

Benefits: can cleanly and delete 100% of what was installed. If you use something on root can always infect, save cache, logs…

I don’t want to impact anything else running on my server. I don’t want anything to depend on that either silently.

Docker is the best thing. I just can’t understand how people still can’t get the benefits yet.

Is Amazing to start a project you had 3 years ago and just works and you can deploy without reading any docs. Just spin a docker container. Eat, safe and just works.

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