[giobox]

While not as easy as an appstore, the modern Docker ecosystem IMO has made self hosting web apps at home super cheap/easy.

Use your old PC, a Raspberry Pi, an EC2 instance, whatever you like, a single small Docker Compose file with Watchtower for auto-updating the container image when new one published etc. I've got self-hosted services that have ran untouched for years this way at home from a handful of lines of YML. Docker Compose will also take care of restarting the service on reboot/powercut if thats a concern.

Given the ubiquity of container images, you can run largely any web application this way and the container image likely already exists - this project also has a Dockerfile and would run fine this way too.

[easyas124]

Why would you use Docker at all? Just run the application behind a reverse proxy. Docker doesn't get you anything except an extra management headache and an abstraction that happily punches holes in your firewall.

[ClumsyPilot]

App A requires a version 2 of whatever which conflicts with version 3 of whatever required by app B, and uses same port as app C and doesn’t like the smell of app D. Meanwhile app Z has to be compiled from source with a specific version of python and only installs on Tuesdays, buts it’s Wednesday if mercury is retrograde

[QuinnyPig]

It may help to view it primarily as a packaging system.

[alex_lav]

I mean...the entire reason docker exists? So that I don't have to understand and manage everyone else's (sometimes insane) build and deploy processes?

[monksy]

Easier to upgrade, no extra system deps to mess up, security because you're shelled into a private environment, isolated storage, network routing.

[bogwog]

Because "installing" an "app" becomes as easy as

    docker run coolapp:latest