I am under the impression that those using Docker are those using shitty interpreted languages that fail hard on version incompatibilities, with Docker being used for version isolation as a workaround. How would a bash script help?
I deploy to pared down bare metal, but I use containerization for development, both local and otherwise, for me and contributors.
So much easier than trying to get a local machine to be set up identically to a myriad of servers running multiple projects with their idiosyncratic needs.
I like developing on my Qubes daily driver so I can easily spin up a server imitating vm, but if I’m getting your help, especially without paying you, then I want development for you to be as seamless as possible whatever your personal preferred setup.
Once you do it for long enough it might be worth it to consider configuration management where you declare native structured resources (users, firewall rules, nginx reverse proxies, etc) rather than writing them in shell.
I use Puppet for distribution of users, firewall rules, SSH hardening + whitelisting, nginx config (rev proxy, static server, etc), Let's Encrypt certs management + renewal + distribution, PostgreSQL config, etc.
The profit from this is huge once you have say 20-30 machines instead of 2-3, user lifecycle in the team that needs to be managed, etc. But the time investment is not trivial - for a couple of machines it is not worth it.
Honestly not having to use Puppet or Ansible are among my reasons for using Docker. I do some basic stuff in cloud-init (which is already frustrating enough) to configure users, ssh, and docker and everything else is just standard Docker tooling.