Couldn’t Distrobox get you through that?

What application are you trying to tweak?

I should also say I use portainer for some graphical hand holding. And I run watchtower for updates (although portainer can monitor GitHub’s and run updates based on monitored merged).

For simplicity I create all my volumes in the portainer gui, then specify the mount points in the docker compose (portainer calls this a stack for some reason).

The volumes are looped into the base OS (Truenas scale) zfs snapshots. Any restoration is dead simple. It keeps 1x yearly, 3x monthly, 4x weekly, and 1x daily snapshot.

All media etc… is mounted via NFS shares (for applications like immich or plex).

Restoration to a new machine should be as simple as pasting the compose, restoring and restoring the Portainer volumes.

Use portainer + watchtower

I use the *arr suite, a project zomboid server, a foundry vtt server, invoice ninja, immich, next cloud, qbittorrent, and caddy.

I pretty much only use prebuilt images, I run them like appliances. Anything custom I’d run in a vm with snapshots as my docker skills do not run that deep.

I love docker, and backups are a breeze if you’re using ZFS or BTRFS with volume sending. That is the bummer about docker, it relies on you to back it up instead of having its native backup system.

I’m going to second this. It runs Android apps with a little bit of config.