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.
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.
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.
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.
Only by exposing the docker socket. And it doesn’t support managing network or volumes.
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.
You can just connect a (local) Git repo to it and store your compose files over there. There should be even an auto-sync (if you’re into that kind of thing).
Not the point. If you want to interact with the compose files directly through the command line they’re all squirelled away in a deep nest of folders, and Portainer throws a hissy fit when you touch them. Dockge has no such issues, it’s quite happy for you to switch back and forth between command line and GUI interaction as you see fit.
It’s both intensely frustrating whenever it comes up as an issue directly, and speaks to a problem with Portainer’s underlying philosophy.
Dockge was built as a tool to help you; it understands that it’s role is to be useful, and to get the fuck out of the way when its not being useful.
Portainer was built as a product. It wants to take over your entire environment and make you completely dependent on it. It never wants you to interact with your stacks through any other means and it gets very upset if you do.
I used Portainer for years, both in my homelab and in production environments. Trust me, I’ve tried to work around its shortcomings, but there’s no good solution to a program like Portainer other than not using it.