I like named volumes, externally created, because they are less likely to be cleaned up without explicit deletion. There’s also a few occasions I need to jump into a volume to edit files but the regular container doesn’t have the tools I need so it’s easier to mount by name rather than hash value.

Does Lemmy have the equivalent of Reddit flair? That made some posts easier to avoid or focus on that others.

I did this and the fun thing about it is that your runner can access things inside your network that a regular GitLab runner can’t. I’ve used it to manage a k8s cluster that isn’t exposed to the Internet at all.

I don’t think it necessarily needs to be either or. Organizing the playbooks and folders myself can be stressful so an extra layer of organization might work best for you. There are other tools like Semaphore that are specifically built for Ansible executions though. Might need a lot of duct tape for Jenkins to run Ansible.

And if you’re not a fan of yaml you can always nope out and embed shell scripts into your Playbooks. You can even put Docker compose yaml inside a playbook but it’s a bit inception-y and I don’t really recommend that.

Ansible is nice but I’ll repeat (as I said in another thread) it’s kind of advanced and gives a much better return on investment if you manage several hosts, plan to switch hosts regularly, or plan to do regular rebuilds of the environment.

Programming is generally not needed when self-hosting. At best you might learn Ansible, Puppet, Salt, or Terraform, but that’s for advanced scenarios (e.g. easily shifting the workloads between machines or into the cloud).

Learning the ins-and-outs of containers will get you the biggest return on investment. They’re not strictly necessary but most tools will expect that is the common use-case and the community won’t be as much help. Until you know more about containers I would also recommend Docker over Podman. It has a few more “conveniences” than Podman and orgs like LinuxServer will target Docker as the engine.

From other replies it sounds like this isn’t guaranteed. I tried logging into pixelfed using my Mastodon info and it didn’t work (stopped me as soon as I gave the instance).