Containers are very lightweight. I have no desire to build anything so I always just add another service container to my existing stacks.

Add in alertmanager and hook it to slack. Get notified whenever containers or systems are misbehaving.

Gitlab at least used to be the open source release of GitHub. I ran it in my lab for a while but stopped as I was using github anyway. It was easy to setup and maintain but it used a lot of resources. I ran it on a vm, there is likely a docker build as well.

My only serious complaint with docker is the quality of their updates. They keep breaking stuff. If podman supported all docker functionality including compose based stacks, I’d consider switching, but last time I looked it didn’t.

Windows requires smb v2 or later. Smb 1 is hopelessly insecure.

The integration of Docker for windows with wsl2 is an abomination that breaks just about every time I update either ddw or windows. Also the fact that it is tied to my user account ( both ddw and wsl2) means that it is not a great choice for persistent services. I still use it to provide monitoring agents for Prometheus and portainer, but otherwise everything runs on Linux vms on my homelab xenserver cluster.

It is possible to install docker without ddw. It’s documented for server versions of windows, but is basically only for running windows containers. The only use case for that is windows build agents as far as I can tell.

Docker can be installed standalone on wsl2 and would be more reliable.

I use bookstack. Simple selfhosted wiki.

Docker Desktop for windows (DDW) using wsl2 for hosting containers is very easy to get started with. It also integrates directly with visual studio code.

Long term you will likely want any useful container services hosted on a Linux vm rather than wsl, as wsl (and DDW) are tied to and start with your Windows user account.

Yeah, as soon as you need to customize anything you are inside a very odd scripting system. On the other hand, in my experience, most stuff just works.