In the beginning, my workflow was pretty sloppy since much of the deployment/management depended on me remembering to restart a container or update a version, manually copy a secret here and there. Things like this. Totally maintainable, sustainable with some effort, but it is not the way. And to some degree these manual interventions will always be necessary, but it will serve me well to reduce them and automate them away as much as reasonable to help these apps live far into the future with little fuss. Many of these apps have proven their usefulness to me over many years, so I have begun to take their management more seriously, slowly taking steps toward git-ops patterns and best practices. Before: scattered .env files. Flat directory of compose files. No documentation. Manually copying secrets by hand. Manually rebuilding host dependencies by hand. Now: a single command issued by a single click of a button (maybe I am overstating the simplicity here…nevertheless) will handle mostly everything I care about. Host setup, Compose projects, rendered secrets, state directories, validation, and deployment are all described in one place. Easy!