Docker: guides & tutorials

Cloud API costs scale linearly with usage. Self-hosting Ollama + n8n + Coolify on a $20/month VPS removes per-token fees for local Ollama inference — you still pay for the VPS, bandwidth, and your time; throughput is limited by CPU/RAM. When workflows call Apify, email, or other SaaS APIs, data transits those providers — not only your server.

This guide covers the complete setup from bare VPS to production-ready AI pipeline, with official documentation links for every step.

TL;DR:

Prerequisites:

• A VPS with 4+ CPU cores, 8+ GB RAM, 80+ GB SSD ($16–$25/month range). Minimum 8 GB RAM required for running Llama 3.1 8B comfortably alongside n8n.
• A domain name pointed to the VPS IP
• Basic terminal/SSH knowledge
• 30–60 minutes of setup time

Development docker-compose.yml works for local runs — production needs secrets management, health checks, resource limits, named volumes, and zero-downtime deploys. This guide shows what sets production Docker Compose apart and provides an annotated template you can adapt. Run it on a Liquid Web VPS for a stable, performant host with SSD storage and managed monitoring.

Coolify is an open-source, self-hosted Heroku and Vercel alternative. Run it on your own VPS to deploy web apps, databases, and cron jobs — with GitHub integration, auto SSL, and one-click PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB. No vendor lock-in, no per-app fees.

Immich is an open-source photo and video backup platform that runs on your server. It offers automatic uploads from mobile apps, face recognition, CLIP-based semantic search, and timeline views — all without sending data to Google. Deploy it with Docker on a Liquid Web VPS for full control and privacy.

This guide takes you from a blank server to a fully running OpenClaw instance — accessible over HTTPS, connected to Telegram, with persistent storage and daily backups. Expect about 20 minutes start to finish.

Traefik is a reverse proxy that discovers services from Docker labels and config files, issues Let's Encrypt certificates automatically, and handles HTTP/3. Version 3 refines middleware syntax and improves performance. This guide covers installation, your first service, middleware for auth and rate limiting, and dashboard security on a Liquid Web VPS.

The best Udemy Docker and DevOps courses for web scraping in 2026 are Docker Mastery (Bret Fisher), Kubernetes for the Absolute Beginners (Mumshad Mannambeth), and Docker Swarm Mastery. These teach containerization, Compose, and orchestration—skills needed to run scrapers at scale and deploy to platforms like Apify.

Browse Docker courses on Udemy

Running web scrapers in Docker on a Liquid Web VPS gives you reproducible builds, easier deploys, and isolation from the host. This guide covers VPS choice, Docker install, a Playwright-based Dockerfile, and a docker-compose stack for scraper + Redis + cron.

Self-hosting Firecrawl with Docker gives you a local crawl-to-markdown API. The official repo provides docker-compose and images. This guide walks through setup and when to use Firecrawl Cloud instead.