No, thats not how it works now. You used to have to install docker-compose and run docker-compose, but now you don’t. Docker comes with compose, but you call it as docker compose rather than the old Python module based way docker-compose

https://www.docker.com/blog/new-docker-compose-v2-and-v1-deprecation/

I saw in your update you mentioned installing docker-compose. Modern docker has “compose” as a verb, and should work as docker compose. I haven’t tested this on raspberry pi though.

I’d personally do what others are suggesting and use bash, but you could also go with http://myrepos.branchable.com/

Sure, you can do whatever you want. You could even use non-rfc1918 addresses and nobody can stop you. It’s just not always a great idea for your own network’s functionality and security. You can use an unregistered TLD if you want, but it’s worth knowing that when people and companies did that in the past, and the TLD was later registered, things didn’t turn out well for them. You wouldn’t expect .foo to be a TLD, right? And it wasn’t, until it was.

Try using .com for your internal network and watch the problems arise. Their choice to reserve .internal helps people avoid fqdn collisions.

See also https://traintocode.com/stop-using-test-dot-com/

My go to for home servers for like 20 years has been used dell optiplexes. They are quite reliable, easy to find, pretty cheap, come in a few different standard physical sizes, and last a long time. The one thing they could do better at is energy efficiency. I spent a total of US $450 on the last two that I bought. I added an LSI HBA to one and it runs 4 HDDs in raidz1.

Syncthing. I switched from Dropbox to syncthing several years ago when Dropbox started enshitifying and never looked back.

all your traffic goes through them right?

Wrong. DNS just resolves hostnames to IP addresses and a few other small things. None of your web traffic will go through your DNS provider.

I’ve had a complete drive failure twice within the last year (really old hardware) and my ansible + docker + backup made it really easy to recover from. I got new hardware and was back up and running within a few hours.

All of your services setup should be automated (through docker-compose or ansible or whatever) and all your configuration data should be backed up. This should make it easy to migrate services from one machine to another, and also to recover from a disaster.