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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
