I got Jellyfin up and running, it’s 10/10. I love this thing, and it reinvigorated my love for watching movies. So I decided to tackle all the other services I wanted, starting with Paperless-ngx…
What a nightmare. It doesn’t have a Windows install so I made an Ubuntu VM. Don’t get me started on Ubuntu. I just spent about 12hrs trying to get Portainer to cooperate and had to give up. I tried just installing Paperless the “normal way” and had to give up on that too.
My point: if you’re getting started selfhosting you have to embrace and accept the self-inflicted punishment. Good luck everybody, I don’t know if I can keep choosing to get disappointed.
Edit: good news! Almost everything I wanted to do is covered by Jellyfin which can be done in Windows.
I recently ditched Portainer entirely - it looks good, but when debugging anything it is really not helpful, often getting in the way. And if it runs on the first try I don’t need a web interface.
My tips:
docker compose
“stacks” over docker directly or native installs. Personally, I just use 4 sub-commands for pretty much everything I do:up
,down
,pull
andlogs
. You (probably) don’t need Portainer.docker-compose.yaml
is right, 2. setting up the.env
file if present, and 3. following the instructions in their README; a container stack doesn’t run after 2 or 3 attempts: copy the error message and search their GitHub issues - chances are someone else also faced that problem. If you can’t find anything similar, open a new issue.