Hello World!¶

Oh boy! I do hope you got time to read this wall of text.

The Problem¶

We're all familiar with the woes of trying to set up our machine just as we like it. But installing / configuring / updating and cleaning up seems to entail too much work sometimes. Even with automation, you still have to monitor it, and react to its hiccups. And when you get on to my level (please don't, as of 2022, homebase is running 50+ containers on multiple and multi-arch devices), sometimes it does seem too big to sink a tooth in. So circa June'17 I went looking for reproducibility, semi-permeable mutability but most of all, redundancy and reliability.

Enter Docker.¶

Docker containerizes all important processes neatly into separate layered images. Is quite well portable as we're moving whole OS images. Running is a breeze as long as its configured properly at runtime. Still, image size becomes an issue sometimes.

Enter Alpine Linux.¶

Now we have smaller images, the mini-rootfs is about 5mb, its blazing fast and pretty secure, deploying and going live in seconds. So, what seems to be the issue now?

After a while, you end up with a bunch of those images. To the point it becomes tedious for one person to build/maintain them.

There was Travis.CI(.org)¶

They allow building Open-Source Projects with their spare buildpower. How cool is that? Now all our base images can build there, only the special sauce needed, we can add it on the fly or customize it before running.

Thank you Mr. Travis. :)

Thus, from the locally hosted repositories, The code went to live at Github. And,

WOAHBase was assimilated.¶

And it was all fine and dandy at my homebase. Things seemed to work good for a while, no issues too hard to handle. But then, the dark times started around Dec'19. Travis announced the end of builds for free on April 1, 2020. It's cool though, it was too good to last anyway, and pretty fun while it did.

Going Dark¶

By the time the builds stopped, I already had a somewhat convoluted-but-works-well buildbot setup going for me, mainly used for small tasks, daily backup or other periodic jobs. So I moved all the builds right there, running on a i5/32G Intel NUC. Keep in mind though, I'm just one guy, no close to Travis.CI, so as I got busy with other stuff in my life, the update frequency soon fell to zero, and after Docker Hub announced they were going to put a limit to their pulls, setting up my private registry seemed the best way to go. I already had my own private git repository that goes back to 2012. So eventually, this tiny part of Github/DockerHub called WOAHBase kind of became deserted.

Back to the Light¶

So that's how it was for a few years, all-the-while I was feeling kind of an itch inside that I'm only building these images for myself, but running maintenance for the whole site along with 80+ images seemed like a mountain-size chore. Since about Q1/Q2-2024, I success(?)fully guilt-tripped myself into deciding that a change was due. And now that I'm considering job-hunting again, I could finally allocate the time to freshen up the the whole project. In the end,

Everything that follows, is a result of what you see here. Thank you for your attention.