Looking at you, Docker compose files.
Docs: “make a docker-compose.yaml, it’s so easy!”
Me: “How?? Where?? What’s the syntax?? ANYTHING AT ALL?”
Some corner of a dusty website only three people have visited in the last two years: “here’s the syntax you need to use for these specific use cases, and you can put it anywhere as long as it’s consistent”
Jesus Fucking Christ is it really that difficult to be a little more specific with this kind of thing? This is why I didn’t start using Docker until very recently. Their docs absolutely suck balls for someone who isn’t already familiar with it.
I don’t know what your budget is, but I recently bought a Sabrent 4-bay housing for ~$230:
It’s got USB-C 3.2, so transfer speeds are plenty quick, and each bay has it’s own locking door and dedicated power button for easy hot swapping. The only downside is that if there’s an unexpected sudden power loss, you have to manually turn each drive bay back on, and there’s no way to do it remotely.
I have an Optiplex 7050 SFF that I dumped a few hundred dollars worth of upgrades into for shits and giggles when I ran it as my daily driver; then I built a beastly Ryzen system to daily and shunted the Optiplex over to server duties, replacing the previous server (14 year-old HP Elitedesk 8100 SFF).
The Optiplex runs everything I can throw at it with ease, far better than the HP could have ever hoped to do.
The Docker documentation is pretty terrible, but it’s a decent start. Start by looking at docker-compose.yml files for the services you want to run and the write-ups for those.
Something nobody ever told me, that I had to figure out myself, is that docker-compose.yml files can be placed anywhere you want.