this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
67 points (98.6% liked)

Selfhosted

39980 readers
603 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I often see people mention the Portainer project and how it's useful, but I never hear any reason to use it other than as a more user friendly front end to service management.

So is there any particular feature or reason to use portainer over docker's CLI? Or is it simply a method of convenience?

This isn't only strictly for self hosting, but I figure people here would know better.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (11 children)

Please don't use Portainer.

  • It kidnaps your compose files and stores them all in its own grubby little lair
  • It makes it basically impossible to interact with docker from the command line once it has its claws into your setup
  • It treats console output - like error messages - as an annoyance, showing a brief snippet on the screen for 0.3 seconds before throwing the whole message in the shredder.

If you want a GUI, Dockge is fantastic. It plays nice with your existing setup, it does a much better job of actually helping out when you've screwed up your compose file, it converts run commands to compose files for you, and it gets the fuck out of the way when you decide to ignore it and use the command line anyway, because it respects your choices and understands that it's here to help your workflow, not to direct your workflow.

Edit to add: A great partner for Dockge is Dozzle, which gives you a nice unified view for logs and performance data for your stacks.

I also want to note that both Dockge and Dozzle are primarily designed for homelab environments and home users. If we're talking professional, large scale usage, especially docker swarms and the like, you really need to get comfortable with the CLI. If you absolutely must have a GUI in an environment like that, Portainer is your only option, but it's still not one I can recommend.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Just because something doesn't fit your use case doesn't make it a terrible product. Portainer isn't meant to complement managing docker via CLI. It's meant to be the management interface.

If you want to manage your environment via CLI, I agree, don't use Portainer. If you're content (or prefer) a GUI, Portainer is a solid option. Esp if you have multiple hosts or want to manage more than just the compose stack. Last time I checked Dockge doesn't do either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (2 children)

The thing is, those poor design decisions have nothing to do with those features, i claim that every feature could be implemented without "holding the compose files hostage".

Btw. dockge does support connecting to another docker dockge instance.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

The thing is, those poor design decisions have nothing to do with those features, i claim that every feature could be implemented without "holding the compose files hostage".

Yes, this is exactly my point. I think I've laid out very clearly how Portainer's shortcomings are far more than just "It's not for your use case."

Portainer is designed, from the ground up to trap you in an ecosystem. The choices they made aren't because it's necessary to do those things that way in order to be a usable Docker GUI. It's solely because they do not want you to be able to easily move away from their platform once you're on it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 month ago

Only by exposing the docker socket. And it doesn't support managing network or volumes.

load more comments (9 replies)