this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
67 points (98.6% liked)

Selfhosted

40394 readers
375 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I've never used Portainer but I feel a GUI setup like it just abstracts Docker and prevents learning concepts that are conducive to understanding Docker. That's why I've never used a GUI to manage my Docker environment.

[–] Voroxpete 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the idea of using a GUI, especially for a non-professional who mostly just wants to get into self-hosting. Not everyone has to learn all the ins and outs of every piece of software they run. My sister is one of the least technical people in the world, and she has her own Jellyfin server. It's not a bad thing that this stuff has become more accessible, and we should encourage that accessibility.

If, however, you intend to use these tools in a professional environment, then you definitely need to understand what's happening under the hood and at least be comfortable working in the command line when necessary. I work with Docker professionally, and Dockge is my go to interface, but I can happily maintain any of my systems with nothing but an SSH connection when required. What I love about Dockge is that it makes this parallel approach possible. The reason I moved my organization away from Portainer is precisely because a lot of more advanced command line interactions would outright break the Portainer setup if attempted, whereas Dockge had no such problems.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Totally, I get it if its a means to an end to get something like Jellyfin up.

Maybe its a me thing. I just like to understand the mechanics of the tools I use.