Move to Docker/ansible hybrid hosting solution

[carlnewton]

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[carlnewton]

Nutomic, a Lemmy developer has advised a way that Lemmy solves a problem I'm having with supporting both Docker container hosting and linux server hosting. Lemmy supports provisioning of a linux server with docker-compose, and then running docker containers on that server. This approach should unify efforts in config by moving everything into the docker config.

The unknowns in this area are quite daunting for me, but I know that it'll be the right solution going forward so here's a bunch of the things I need to understand before I can adopt it:

Deployment - Docker hosting solutions have to hold the container process open, once it is stopped, the container is destroyed. This would presumably not be the case in our scenario here, and so we could perhaps still use PHP deployer for deployments. What that looks like in practice, I'm not sure.

Database - Perhaps, just as with local development, a second container for mysql should be created. What would this mean in terms of backups etc?

Image storage - How does Lemmy deal with growing storage demands? Does it also support something like AWS S3? Does it suffer from fixed volume sizes?

Swap - On what layer will the swap need to exist? Perhaps both?

Once I have explored how Lemmy (and presumably Mastodon) deals with the above, I can then make the decision as to how best to deal with them for Habitat.