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.
As another commenter mentioned, Lazydocker combines Dockge and Dozzle features, and adds some other things to give you a TUI environment that works over SSH so you don’t have to open a web port to use it.
I’d imagine that if your job is making YouTube videos, portainer and other graphical abstraction layers probably make more visually interesting videos than just watching someone type out a bunch of commands.
Use docker compose
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;)The constant argument in this space that you must know the arcane workings of everything you use, is exhausting.
