To use the docker compose configurations you obviously need docker with the compose extension installed. The repository also expects that you are able to run the docker commands without root permissions.
If you want to use a service that exposes a DNS service on port 53 (for example Pihole), you also need to disable the local stub DNS resolver.
This repository is managed with tug, a small standalone CLI that orchestrates the compose projects. Install it by following the instructions in its own repository, so that the tug binary is available on your PATH.
You can use the repository without tug at all — the compose files are plain Docker Compose configurations — but this guide assumes tug is installed. Run tug help to see every available command.
Before you can start any of the services, you need to configure them. To do that, run tug configure <project-name>, where project-name is the name of the folder of the service you want to configure. The command asks you for all the required configuration values and stores them in a .env.local file in the root of the repository. It also creates all the required docker volumes and networks for the service.
If a service depends on other services, those are configured too. For example, most services depend on Traefik, so you will have to enter the configuration for Traefik as well if you haven't already.
If you don't want to use tug, you can configure things by hand: set the required variables (in the root .env/.env.local file, or an additional .env file in the service's directory) and create the required docker volumes and networks yourself.
Once the configuration is done, start a service with tug up <project-name> and stop it with tug down <project-name>. tug up starts the service together with everything in its dependency chain, in order; tug down stops just the named service. Add --wait to tug up to block until every container reports healthy.
If you don't want to use tug, run the corresponding docker compose commands yourself.
tug covers the rest of the lifecycle too — pull, restart, logs, ps, list, all, backup-volumes / restore-volumes, and new (scaffold a new app). Run tug help for the full list, or tug <command> --help for the options of a specific command.