Few comments/corrections:
docker compose is unnecessary when you run just one application container.
Docker is pretty much deprecated nowadays as it have a better, mature successor: Podman (a.k.a. "libpod") https://podman.io/
Ubuntu (redundant Debian derivative) is unnecessary and unjustifiable. Since it have no technical reasons to exist, it is better to use Debian instead.
hived v1.27.7 have been (already) tagged/released on 2024-12-14: https://github.com/openhive-network/hive/releases
hived requires certain parameters to be applied when you run the container and with the help of compose yaml files you get to just start the container with a very short command. There is nothing wrong with other ways of running a container.
Debian should be fine but Ubuntu 22 is the recommended OS for Hive apps.
That's just a bad release naming. The latest unstable version of hived currently is 1.27.7rc16 so the logical next stable release should have been 1.27.7. Once there is a stable release I can edit the post.
What do you mean by "bad release naming"? Project obviously follows semantic versioning: https://semver.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_versioning
In the same source you sent:
RC comes before the stable release
You can't have 1.0.0 then release 1.0.0-rc.1
The latest release of hived is 1.27.7rc16 (https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/tags) and you can't release that after releasing 1.27.7
RC: Release Candidate
1.27.7rc16 means it is a candidate to become 1.27.7
And no. hived does not follow semver.
I see, apparently developers made a mistake with tagging
1.27.7, and they did not correct it by properly incrementing minor release number... Indeed it is a violation of versioning best practice. (I reported this issue as https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/issues/740)At least versioning pattern seems to suggest that there could have been an intent to use semver...
Regarding "Ubuntu 22 is the recommended OS for Hive apps", host OS does not matter if you run Docker container anyway. Recommendation is obviously misguided, but at least it have some validity as notion that application builds from source in that environment (and that Ubuntu 22 is used as development environment by some active developers).