Part 2 of 4 — Getting Started with Your Synology · ← Part 1: First-Time DSM Setup
Second guide in the series. Your NAS is set up, storage is sane, 2FA’s on — now comes the decision that actually shapes everything after it: how you’re going to install software on this thing. DSM gives you two real paths, and they’re not interchangeable.
Package Center: the appliance path
Package Center installs Synology-native .spk packages — Synology’s own apps (Drive, Photos, Surveillance Station) plus a curated set of third-party software, vetted and packaged specifically for DSM. DSM handles updates centrally, uninstalling is clean, and there’s basically nothing to configure beyond the app itself.
The tradeoff is selection and freshness. You get what Synology (or the community SynoCommunity repo) has packaged, and it can lag behind upstream releases by weeks or months. Fine for infrastructure-y stuff you want to just work. Not where you’ll find most self-hosted apps.
Container Manager: the actual homelab path
Container Manager is a GUI over Docker Engine. Anything published as a Docker image — which by now is most of the self-hosted world — runs here, regardless of whether Synology or anyone else ever packaged it for DSM specifically. As of DSM 7.2, its Project tab accepts a real docker-compose.yml directly, which is the difference that actually matters: a compose file is a plain text description of the whole setup — image, ports, volumes, environment variables — that you can keep, version, and reuse, instead of a pile of GUI settings that exist only in DSM’s database.
Two habits worth having from day one
Pin image versions instead of riding :latest. It’s tempting to leave every compose file on :latest so it always grabs the newest build, but that also means an update can silently break something with zero warning and no easy way to know which update did it. Pin a version, bump it deliberately when you actually want to.