In most cases you can get away with over mounting configuration files within the container. In extreme cases you can build your own image - but the steps for that are just the changes you would have applied manually on a VM. At least that image is repeatable and you can bring it up somewhere else without having to manually apply all those changes in a panic.

For me the power of docker is its inherent immutability. I want to be able to move a service around without having to manual tinker, install packages and change permissions etc. It’s repeatable and reliable. However, to get to the point of understanding enough about it to do this reliably can be a huge investment of time. As a daily user of docker (and k8s) I would use it everyday over a VM. I’ve lost count of the number of VMs I’ve setup following installation guidelines, and missed a single step - so machines that should be identical aren’t. I do however understand the frustration with it when you first start, but IMO stick with it as the benefits are huge.

I moved to Rukus from Unifi and the difference is night and day. Unifi does not play nice with Sonos and the firmware is rock solid compared to Unifi.

I had a similar issue and it related to the uplink connectivity monitor. Unifi monitors the gateway and controller IP and withdraws the SSID if it can’t contact either of them. Make sure you have turned off wireless meshing on the device and I think you can manually disable the uplink connectivity monitor.

Having used HAProxy for 15 years commercially, I absolutely agree with this. There are lots of complex features of HAProxy that only a dedicated proxy can provide. The acls, deep packet inspection and stick tables are a few.

Whilst it doesn’t directly “serve” PHP or Python - it’s a load balancer so can just have regular Apache or nginx backends serving content which is arguably its main use case. For homelab this doesn’t always make sense but I would pick nginx for high traffic commercial environments.