13 ms·
Cockpit – Integrated, glanceable, web-based interface for servers
- rudasn 6y agoAnybody uses this in production? Is it good/suitable for managing servers (bare metal) behind VPN?
- farisjarrah 6y agoI haven't used this in production as something like this gets a bit out of hand once you need to manage more then like 5 machines. However, for home setups or a very small office, this works great. I've used it on and off for years for my home servers. Its really nice to just be able to restart a service without having to whip out a ssh client, just log into a webpage on your phone and you can fully manage your server.
- java-man 6y agoWould anyone be interested in a desktop application with similar functionality, accessing [multiple] hosts via SSH?
- codetrotter 6y agoDepends. Open source or proprietary? Actually desktop or just electron? Are you going to maintain it? What use cases would it be intended for? Would the client software be available for macOS? Which GUI framework(s) would you be using?
- java-man 6y agoproprietary, cross-platform desktop linux/mac/windows, javafx. use cases: server management and monitoring, log viewer, ssh terminals, parallel execution of commands, vnc, sftp, secure storage of credentials and keys. [0] https://github.com/andy-goryachev/AccessPanelPublic https://github.com/andy-goryachev/AccessPanelPublic
- indigodaddy 6y agoThis is very cool actually.. neat idea! And this just uses ssh protocol for all communication? Nothing needs to be installed server-side right?
- java-man 6y agothank you! it's still far, far away from being useful.
- cheph 6y agoActually no, the web interface is really slick. I would not install a desktop app for it even if there was one.
- java-man 6y agoyou do need to install cockpit on [all] your server[s], right? i am trying to figure out if there is a business case for a desktop app. there is plenty of open source and commercial systems more or less similar to cockpit, and it's hard to compete with free
- johnchristopher 6y agoI don't like having to install cockpit on every instance/devices. That means I have to keep all of them up to date in addition of installing them and configuring the devices to make it operable. I'd rather have a client-only app that connect through ssh and get its data from standard binaries installed on the server. So, yes. I'd give that a try.
- java-man 6y agoany specific feature that would motivate you to shell out fifty bucks? (half-joke)
- johnchristopher 6y agoAs a hobbyist that'd be hard to justify. At work I manage two standard LAMP servers only. So I am not really your audience. I think I'd like some kind of alerts on some specific events (disk space, some logs, IDK), systemctl management and status/reporting, some instantaneous “update as I type” filtering/searching in logs, cron and/or systemctl timer management, space usage graphics, booting reports, etc. ... maybe these are just things I usually do and think a GUI would be nice to have if I had to do it for multiple servers. Not enough experience with that in a professional setting though so take it all with a grain of salt. But as-is, I think I could justify asking for 50 bucks for the product if I needed it.
- teejmya 6y agohttps://www.royalapps.com/ https://www.royalapps.com/ does this. I'm a happy paying user of RoyalTS.
- indigodaddy 6y agoI don’t think just an ssh client is exactly what he is going for/talking about. Check out the GitHub he references further on down in this thread.
- candiddevmike 6y agoFriends don't let friends configure linux from a web UI. It's messy, built off of assumptions, and is ripe for exploitation. Plus, if all you ever use is a web UI, how are you supposed to troubleshoot or fix the machine when said web UI stops working? If you're looking for pretty, single host, read-only monitoring dashboards though, checkout Netdata: https://www.netdata.cloud/ https://www.netdata.cloud/
- blackrock 6y agoI would say it’s easier to just fix your web UI. And if that fails then revert to SSH and the command line. Webmin is pretty useful.
- dddw 6y agoCan vouch for netdata
- technick 6y agoI had to fire a guy in 2003 for installing webmin on a bunch of internet facing servers (webhost). Any Linux guy worth their salt isn't using a web gui for administration.
- TwoNineA 6y agoI prefer virt-manager to Cockpit's VM management, way more feature complete.
- znpy 6y agoFor VM management I agree with you. For other things cockpit is mostly fine.
- cheph 6y agoCockpit is not ever going to be as good as using the underlying tools it integrates with, but it is still pretty nice for what it is and I like having it.
- spijdar 6y agoI haven't really kept up with this, but last I heard virt-manager was deprecated (on RHEL at least) in favor of just Cockpit, hence the comparison. Cockpit is definitely nice, but it still feels pretty incomplete compared to virt-manager. virt-manager appears to still be developed, though, just without the same blessing/level of support from Red Hat.
- rwmj 6y agoSadly true: deprecated in RHEL 8, removed in RHEL 9. Although we'll continue to develop and ship virt-manager in EPEL so the majority of people will still easily be able to install it.
- StillBored 6y agovirt-manager is just a shim on top of libvirt same as cockpit's VM component. So there really isn't any excuse on that front. Although your comparing a tool built as a competitor to something like vmware workstation/virtualbox against a general purpose machine mgmt tool that happens to be able to do some VM mgmt as well. PS: I think both are good, but I too use virt-manager for all my VM twitting because nothing else on linux is both as feature complete for qemu/KVM while also avoiding having to read the manual just to adjust some VM parameter.
- Finnucane 6y agoI've been using cockpit and cockpit-machine at home to manage a Windows VM I need for work stuff. It works pretty well except I wish there was better documentation for configuration; I haven't yet got the VM to recognize that I have a 4k monitor.
- williesleg 6y agopssh is the bomb not this crap.
- reidjs 6y agoI installed on one of my ubuntu servers and allowed port 9090, but when I try accessing it from chrome it gives me a warning page "You cannot (IP) right now because the website sent scrambled credentials that Google Chrome cannot process." Is this because I run a NGINX server from that box?
- pmontra 6y agoDo you have an expired self signed certificate on that server? See https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/10551759?hl=en https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/10551759?hl=en
- walrus01 6y agosounds like a TLS cert error related to a 'snakeoil' self signed cert or something
- jeroenhd 6y agoThis sounds like a certificate problem, or the browser trying to use https on an HTTP port. If you've deployed Let's Encrypt on the same host, the browser might force the connection to work over HTTPS because Let's Encrypt often adds a so-called HSTS header to the config. If it's just Chrome not trusting the certificate, you can usually override the error by clicking "details" and then continuing by clicking a link. If the override isn't there (because of HSTS or similar), you can type "thisisunsafe" into the web page to override any non-technical certificate errors (there's no input field but it'll work)
- 867-5309 6y agosearched linked page and documentation contents for "secu" - 0/0 results found. can anyone vouch for its security?
- cheph 6y agohttps://cockpit-project.org/blog/is-cockpit-secure.html https://cockpit-project.org/blog/is-cockpit-secure.html In short, most likely, unless you are reckless with it.
- cheph 6y agoIt is very nice but like other redhat stuff this somehow prevents browsers from saving passwords, or at least it did last I used it. EDIT: Actually they seem to have fixed it now. Nifty.
- dang 6y agoIf curious see also Cockpit – Administer Linux servers via a web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16445612 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16445612 - Feb 2018 (148 comments)
- wolfhumble 6y agoIs there a way in Cockpit to log the actual commands run by the system to e.g. format/partition a storage device, create Virtual Networks etc?
- Naac 6y agoI set it up for my handrolled homelab server automation ( all Arch Linux servers ), back when I was doing everything with virsh. It worked "ok". It required pulling in a bunch of dependencies I wouldn't have normally installed. I had it set up behind an HAproxy LB, with ssl terminated at the LB. When I was using it ~1 year ago, it was pretty buggy, and certain components would crash and I would have to restart the web page. Overall it was a mediocre experience, but I suppose better than having to ssh into every server. The main pain point was that I still had to go in to every server, and install cockpit. In the end, I ended up just moving on to Proxmox. But I suppose cockpit is nice if you don't want a centrally managed cluster, but still want a web interface.
- warmwaffles 6y agoGlad I am not the only insane person running Arch for their homelab stuff.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- circularfoyers 6y agoConsidering Cockpit is neither supported nor tested on Arch Linux[1], I think forming an opinion of it based on that would be unfair. [1] https://cockpit-project.org/running.html https://cockpit-project.org/running.html
- Naac 6y agoIt's in the official Arch Linux repository. And they even decided to include it in their table from your link. I think its definitely a valid opinion to have. And I would stand by not recommending Cockpit until it becomes more polished.
- walrus01 6y agoI sure wouldn't rely on this to do anything serious, but it's better than the ancient/mediocre alternative (webmin)
- INTPenis 6y agoThey're making great progress, it works and I have a friend who otherwise doesn't work in Linux happily use it on his homelab server. For anyone experienced it's probably just a hinderance.
- luplex 6y agoIs there a reason why successfully running software on a server is so much harder than running software on your phone? I don't think it needs to be this way. Someone needs to figure out server software for consumers. Just like PCs became more accessible, so should servers! Edit: Brainstorming here: specifically, I'd like a more accessible UI, automatic updates, sensible defaults on all apps, an easier way to get started and so on.
- rlyshw 6y agoOnce you get the infrastructure set up and cloud-init-enabled template images, servers can be very turnkey. I can spin up a new DNS-addressable, auto-updating Ubuntu VM in two or three clicks then deploy software like this on it from the CLI. There’s even a system for easy LXC container apps called turnkey Linux. Works great with Proxmox.
- JeremyTKL 6y agoFWIW TurnKey is also available in ISO & OVA too (plus other builds such as EC2). So even if you aren't using Promxox/LXC you can still give TurnKey a try! :)
- e12e 6y agoIt's not a trivial thing - docker and sandstorm.io might be two examples of making some decent headway here. Just today I set up a postgres and ms sql server for testing - pretty much identically, running out of their own named docker containers (for those not aware, it's even more similar than it sounds, ms sql runs on Linux now).
- effie 6y agoWhy do you want to run MS SQL on Linux? What will you do when the db gets locked or crashes? You call Microsoft and wait?
- e12e 6y ago> What will you do when the db gets locked or crashes? You call Microsoft and wait? Actually, it would appear ms is quite serious about sql server on Linux: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/linux/choosing-licensing-model-using-mssql-conf https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/sql/linux/choo... So I guess, similar to running sql server on windows?
- whalesalad 6y agoI live in the shell but for my home vms/boxes I love having this available. It’s particularly neat that you can integrate them all together and jump between different hosts. There are also extension packages to manage vms and Docker containers which is fun if I want to fire up a remote task. Back in the day the closest thing to this was software called webmin.
- js4ever 6y agoShameless plug,I made a lightweight real time monitoring tools using websockets, it's open source: https://github.com/elestio/ws-monitoring/ https://github.com/elestio/ws-monitoring/ Contributions are welcome :)
- fritex 6y agoISPConfig vs Cockpit?
- nuker 6y agoI'm searching for remote server file manager right now. I want to copy (and compare) large directories on same Linux server from my Macbook. Cannot find one so far. Cockpit: "here is no graphical file manager, and we don't plan to add one." https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues/11011 https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit/issues/11011 CuberDuck: "FTP and SFTP do not support a copy operation." Is there a way with GUI?
- qbasic_forever 6y agoSyncthing if you want continuous sync. Rclone if you want periodic rsync-style copies. Both have web UIs, although they're definitely aimed at the power user and not novices. If they're non-technical users you probably want to setup a nextcloud or similar system so they get a more dropbox-like experience. edit: reddit.com/r/selfhosted always has good threads on self-hosted web file managers too
- nuker 6y agoTo clarify, priority is browsing, copying and moving stuff on same remote server, not copying data between machines. Thanks, will try these anyway. Trying this too https://cloudcmd.io https://cloudcmd.io Edit: Cloud Commander works, gives you two-pane webgui with a row of Fx buttons below. F5 copies files locally.
- juangacovas 6y ago"lsyncd" is really good for efficient, continuous sync. If you have password-less, public-key SSH auth, lsyncd is a bless (using it for millions of files and folders and doing good)
- jehb 6y agoCan you mount the remote server over SSHFS or NFS or SMB and do the work locally on a file manager of your choice with a remote filesystem? Or, if that's not a good option, what about a installing a TUI remotely that you can use in the console like midnight commander? Just some ideas. YMMV.
- 1MachineElf 6y agoI'm surprised no one has compared this with cPanel yet. Seems to be a wonderful alternative, and I wonder if it will be offered by VPS providers.
- psidhu 6y agoI first ran into Cockpit when I put Fedora 33 Server Edition on an RPi. Needless to say, I was blown away by it and now keep it enabled on several servers I run. I highly recommend it to anyone here, especially on something like a headless server where you don't want or can't have an X11 UI running.
- airocker 6y agothere are so many tools and interfaces for similar things: prometheus, elastic search(ES), new relic, splunk .... I think the world is converging on 2 stacks: ES and prometheus. ES is hard to operate but can handle everything: metrics, tracing, logs. Prometheus promises to be easy to use and has good metrics and alerting. In our work, we chose ES. I don't think so far ease of use is possible and team has to get hands dirty for any good solution.
- neonihil 6y agoIt comes on fedora servers by default. I’ve been using it for the last 3 years on my home servers. I’ve also installed it on armbian running on my *Pi devices. It works just fine in my experience. I’ve configured mdraid with it for fun - and it worked. Ditched it in favour of Zfs which is not yet supported unfortunately. I think it’s a good direction. It will become the default “GUI” for server maintenance I think.
- maveonair 6y agoCockpit is a nice frontend for servers. But for my homelab I run UnRAID (https://unraid.net/ https://unraid.net/) which is an amazing software to rollout your own NAS and run services as Docker containers. Furthermore, the web UI is amazing to manage Docker containers and VMs. And the community is awesome if you need any help.
- Aeolun 6y agoI just get a nice white screen on mobile :/
- rapsey 6y agoThis is pretty cool but honestly why is this written in c. For no reason you are increasing the attack surface of your users.
- PanosJee 6y agoHave you tried Netdata?
- chousuke 6y agoHas anyone tried to use this stuff at a scale of greater than a dozen servers? I briefly tried it in my homelab on CentOS 8, and immediately hit enough weirdness that I'm just back to SSH with Ansible now. I suppose having a GUI can be nice for a health overview of your infrastructure, but in general I dislike GUIs for actual administrative work, since using them is a practice that steers you away from automation. Most GUI tools don't provide you very good ways to make "atomic" changes, which is made very easy if you run your automation from a git repository, since the final review before hitting go is just "git diff".
- tinco 6y agoTried it on ubuntu, it also has weirdness there. The whole tool is definitely rough around the edges. I would never use it to actually change machines though. Definitely Ansible over SSH is the way to go there. I've mixed feelings about controlling the machines through cockpit. In theory there shouldn't be any difference between SSH and HTTPS on the security of the protocol side, but it definitely feels iffy to have a python (I think?) web app execute administration commands on a server. I wonder what the security professionals think of it.
- chousuke 6y agoI have to admit the Cockpit architecture is not entirely clear to me, but at least it seems to allow using SSH as a remote transport, so you don't actually need to install the web stuff on all servers. GUIs are great for discoverability and observation, but they always make my life harder when I actually need to manage change in a system. As simple as it is, there's so far nothing that beats plain old text as the source of truth for how things should be; even if you have a fancy API to actually make changes into a system, you'd still want the desired state of that system to be stored as plain old text, so that changes may be tracked and reviewed easily.
- lmns 6y agoYou could have the best of both worlds and only modify the state of your system through a well defined API and then serialize the change in some kind of config file if and only if the change was successful (rollback to the last good state otherwise).
- akkishore 6y agoCheckout MultiSSH for administering multiple machines over SSH: https://multissh.dev/ https://multissh.dev/
- TruthWillHurt 6y agoWhat is this "servers" you speak of?
- robbyt 6y agoIt looks like this is written in Javascript with C backend components. I would never trust giving root to a web service written in C. If anyone deploys this, make sure to bind only to localhost, and use an ssh tunnel to access it remotely, otherwise you're opening a massive attack surface.
- jpswade 6y agoI’ve actually been investigating cPanel alternatives as it’s become expensive and I think customers should have choice. I find it interesting that I didn’t come across this one in all of my research I did last week or so, even though it’s backed by Redhat. I actually think although we’re in a time of striving for serverless, there will always be a market for self hosting, be it niche. Not everyone is building a huge SaaS platform but wants to run more than just a blog or website. I don’t think this is the answer though. I think what these type of servers need is a standardised layer to interact with them, an API, something like how we have EPP for domains. Because as we know, frontend will change so fast. The underlying hardware and OS changes too. Now seems like the right time to invent a new level of abstraction. I’m not aware of anything that exists like this.
- freedomben 6y agoCockpit is super cool. I've been using it for personal stuff for years now, especially since it's trivial to enable and use. I even use it in production for monitoring small sites/apps. The graphs for CPU/Mem/Network/Disk are really great, and I can leave them open in a tab on my browser. I run one fairly popular blog that as a web machine and a db machine, and it's great for that. That said I don't use it for "serious production" where I have more than a couple of machines simply because at that scale I prefer cattle to pets and I prefer aggregation. I also find myself strongly preferring SSH and the CLI, likely because I'm very familiar with all that and have been doing that for decades. I've never heard of security issues with Cockpit, but I do firewall it off from everyone but my own IP (or a few others if they are involved). It's pretty easy to do: # Get your IP address from home or work: curl -s 'https://api.ipify.org' MY_IP=<ip> firewall-cmd --zone-public --permanent --remove-service=cockpit firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent \ --add-rich-rule="rule family=\"ipv4\" source address=\"${MY_IP}\" port protocol=\"tcp\" port=\"9090\" accept" firewall-cmd --reload Here's a gist of it: https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/0aabe5493ba02d1c9bb33fea2ec5e944 https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/0aabe5493ba02d1c9bb33fea2...
- notyourday 6y agoThis is 1990s philosophy with a pretty wrapper. We know it does not work even for pets, not to mention cattle.
- iqandjoke 6y agoTenable is using it.