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.
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;)The constant argument in this space that you must know the arcane workings of everything you use, is exhausting.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you know Linux CLI, is there a reason to use GUI? Same principle CLI gives you more granular control and GUI simplifies a lot of things, gives you more of insight etc
Use docker compose
My main 2 reasons for installing it both come from needing to restart services sometimes:
Portainer let me allow other people access to restarting specific containers that occasionally misbehave
Portainer lets me update and restart all of the containers running in my VPN stack without breaking. For some ungodly reason, even with dependency set and everything in docker-compose, a CLI reboot will basically always start a service or 2 before gluetun is actually advertising it’s in a healthy state and everything breaks. With portainer that doesn’t happen, with the exact same compose, and I don’t get why lol
And then there is me. I had to start my stack 7 times yesterday in portainer. I should really figure out how to set it up right. I had thought setting gluetun to a static IP would get it to launch first. Or adding it to the top of the config. But alas. No go.
What works for me:
Networks first in docker-compose
Gluetun first in Services, uses the network I set for it and the stack
Everything else goes below it, relying on the gluetun CONTAINER (I plan to have another stack running gluetun for other reasons so having it check the service is a no go for me) to be running in a HEALTHY state
All are set to restart: unless-stopped except gluetun, which is never
The expected behaviour is that containers will always wait for gluetun to report that it’s healthy before trying again to restart. Should gluetun fail and crash for any reason it won’t reboot and potentially fuck itself up harder, and no services will be able to start because it’s not reporting healthy.
This works perfectly in portainer and should when running docker-compose up, but for me it took portainer to work. Saw someone somewhere mention it has some sort of priority handling override built into it that docker itself doesn’t, meaning it’s less likely to fuck that lind of thing up, but idk how true it is
I’ll see if I can remember to snag a couple snips of my YAML to make it more clear
Awesome. Thank you so much. Saving this for when I get back into town. Gonna fuck around and find out Monday 💜🙏
Ok, had my wife send me the file from my network
networks: main-network: name: ${COMPOSE_PROJECT_NAME} attachable: true ipam: driver: default config: - subnet: configure ip_range: this gateway: yoself services: # Gluetun - <https://github.com/qdm12/gluetun> gluetun: image: qmcgaw/gluetun container_name: gluetun networks: - main-network cap_add: - NET_ADMIN environment: - PUID=${PUID} - PGID=${PGID} - TZ=${TZ} - VPN_SERVICE_PROVIDER=custom - VPN_TYPE=wireguard - VPN_PORT_FORWARDING=true - VPN_PORT_FORWARDING_PROVIDER=protonvpn - WIREGUARD_ADDRESSES=use your own - WIREGUARD_ALLOWED_IPS=0.0.0.0/0 - WIREGUARD_PRIVATE_KEY=nope - WIREGUARD_PUBLIC_KEY=69420 - WIREGUARD_DNS= - VPN_ENDPOINT_PORT= - VPN_ENDPOINT_IP= volumes: - ${DOAPPDAT}/gluetun:/gluetunI left in the wireguard stuff without my details because for me Gluetun refused to work when setting the exact same info to wg0.conf, so I define it in my compose
Then, services that rely on gluetun go below and look like:
# qBittorrent - <https://hub.docker.com/r/linuxserver/qbittorrent> qbittorrent: container_name: qbittorrent network_mode: container:gluetun image: lscr.io/linuxserver/qbittorrent:latest depends_on: gluetun: condition: service_healthy restart: unless-stoppedWorks perfectly when I run it through portainer
It worked. Muahaha it worked. Thank you so much. I still have so much to learn. But one click and repulled and redeployed. The only change I needed in my config was to add.
depends_on: gluetun: condition: service_healthyInto each container that was controlled by gluetun
Wow. What an awesome wife. I think I just discovered a new relationship goal.
Thank you so much. 😊 I see a few things already worth changing in my file. You da best.
It took me too long to get everything working myself because people love to share shit exclusively in CLI format and look down at anyone who asks for YAML it seems, so I’m always glad to pass it on
(I can understand CLI, but the ADHD brain finds YAML much easier for documentation purposes and it surprises me how many people seem to disagree)
