As someone who one week ago switched from a Debian to NixOS setup, using docker compose, I'd be very interested in hearing more if you have any resources or tips to share.

I was hoping to move over to running rootless containers, but so far my HA setup has proven to be a pita to get working.

> What I use and really recommend is using systemd +/- docker

Even better, systemd+podman (=quadlets).

Quadlets are great, you basically can declare a compose file as a systemd unit with all the good and bad that comes with that.

I disagree - I think k8s is absolutely the right choice at that level. We use ECS instead of k8s for small projects because the control plane is more than the actual service, but when you want container management, some sort of basic deployment management, service discovery, storage management and secret management, k8s is super simple to run and works pretty much out of the box. For a homelab, I'd expect you to want this. Building it all yourself may be fun (and that's a good reason to do it), but it's going to result in all the complexity with a lot of issues that k8s just solves for you.

> I'd expect you to want this

The thing is, I don't want any of that. At least, I don't want any of it to be dynamic. For my purposes the more I can determine at deploy time and make static the better.

K8s is a stack of dozens-to-hundreds of control loops that are built around the idiosyncrasies of a particular distributed key-value store that is only moderately fit for purpose. This is all great fun if you want to learn about it (I did!) and/or if you get to be a user rather than an operator.

NixOS, IncusOS, FCOS Atomic. Completely agree. Immutable host. This is the way