Selfhosted

Is it considered best practice to run a bunch of different compose files, and update them all separately?

tl;dr I do one compose file per application/folder because I found that to suite me best.

I knew about docker and what is was for a long time, but just recently started to use it (past year or so) so I'm no expert . Before docker, I had one VM for each application I wanted and if I messed something up (installed something and it broke or something), I just removed the entier VM and made a new one. This also comes with the problem that every VM needs to be stopped before the host can be shutdown, and startup took more work to ensure that it worked correctly.

Here is a sample of my layout:

.
├──audiobookshelf
│  ├──config
├──diun
│  └───data
├──jellyfin
├──kuma
├──mealie
│  ├──data
│  └──pgdata
├──n8n
│  ├──n8n_data
│  └──n8n_files
├──paperless
│  ├──consume
│  └──export
├──syncthing
│  └──data
└───tasksmd
    └──config

I considered using one compose file and put everything in it by opted to instead use one file for each project. Using one compose file for everything would make it difficult to stop just one application. And by having it split into separate folders, I can just remove everything in it if I mess up and start a new container.

As for updating, I made script that pulls everything:

#!/bin/bash

function docker_update {
    cd $1
    docker compose down && docker compose pull && docker compose up -d
}
docker_update "/path/to/app1"
docker_update "/path/to/app2"
docker_update "/path/to/app3"

Here is a small sample from my n8n compose file (not complete file):

services:
  db:
    container_name: n8n-db
    image: postgres
    ...
    networks:
      - n8n-network

  adminer:
    container_name: n8n-db-adminer
    image: adminer
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 8372:8080
    networks:
      - shared-network
      - n8n-network

  n8n:
    container_name: n8n
    networks:
      - n8n-network
      - shared-network
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_healthy

volumes:
  db_data:

networks:
  n8n-network:
  shared-network:
    external: true

shared-network is shared between Caddy and any containter I need to access to externally (reverse proxy) and then one network that is shared between the applications.