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.
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.
I switched from portainer to dockge. Dockge makes updating a 1-click process which I love. Portainer is overkill for homelab, but I like how it lists things like images and networks.
Like many GUIs it makes it so you don’t have to remember and type a bunch of commands to carry out basic tasks. I especially find it convenient for checking logs. But no unique functionality compared to CLI. So it’s a matter of preference.
But that’s also why you don’t know the commands in the first place, if you used them you would remember them. It’s self sustaining ignorance ;)
Ps: I kid, there a lot of stuff I don’t care to remember the cli for and I happily use GUI.
PPS:
docker logs -f container_name;)This is why you use fish shell and just type something vaguely similar to what you remember and hit the up arrow key.
I’m using it to manage a little swarm , the useful thing is that is easy to explain to a non IT person how to log in and restart a service if needed.
95% of the time I’ll use the CLI but occasionally it’s faster for me to check a bunch of boxes in Portainer and restart entire stacks at the same time instead of going to each one’s folder. Maybe a few other little things like that but you get the idea.
It’s a good way to have all the different parts exposed to you. Once you’re familiar, it’s usually easier to write those parts up in a compose file and just run or rerun docker-compose.
This is exactly what I do. I find Portainer to be nice for getting an overview of my containers that are all created using docker-compose.
Personal preference? I prefer the Portainer’s presentation over the CLI. I especially find it easier to manage networks and volumes.
But my main reason is I have multiple docker hosts and it gives me a “single pane on glass” to manage everything from.
It’s just a front-end abstraction for different c ontainer backends, so no. I don’t think they have some distinct features that deal in any functionality for the container ecosystem or anything.
