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Cockpit Project
- spicyusername 4y agoIIRC this can come installed by default with RHEL and Fedora server if you select it during installation.
- LanternLight83 4y agoI first ran into Cockpit when it was included on a Fedora Server install, and I've been really impressed! It's sleek, I've never had any major[1] issues with it, and I really appreciate the wide variety[2] of functionality that you can include, eg. cockpit-machines for Virtual Machines and the EOL[3] cockpit-zfs for all sorts of regular RAID activities. My sole gripe is that, IIRC, it's really tied into a dependency on Systemd, so I can't use it on any of my current machines which run elogind-based distros like GuixSD or a typical Gentoo installation. I don't happen to have any systemd-based distros installed atm, and if I did, can't imagine I'd use Cockpit regularly unless I could use it everywhere-- but I do wish I could! Maybe the systemd functionality can be factored out and re-implemented, but I'm not sure if anyone's going to decide it's worth their time and effort. [1]: I did have to set $TERM=linux for the web-shell to behave correctly, but am not convinced that's an issue with Cockpit itself. [2]: https://cockpit-project.org/applications https://cockpit-project.org/applications [3]: https://github.com/optimans/cockpit-zfs-manager/commit/80190e28cb3028de93b62bcebe8e5aa7988905da https://github.com/optimans/cockpit-zfs-manager/commit/80190...
- hrdwdmrbl 4y agoWhen i was new to Linux all i wanted was GUI versions of every CLI. I even dreamed of writing something that would turn man pages into GUIs
- dvtrn 4y agoStatic site generator for man pages? Sounds like a fun “just because” thing to do actually.
- TheDong 4y agoWe can call it groff, and invoke it via "groff -mandoc -Thtml" The output of such a program might look something like this I think: https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/groff.1.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/groff.1.html
- paranoidrobot 4y agoThis renders the manpage as HTML - I read the original suggestion as creating a GUI for the tool itself, from manpages.
- lloeki 4y agoxman ;) https://manpages.org/xman https://manpages.org/xman
- paranoidrobot 4y agoThat's a manpages browser. Not a GUI for the tool itself. I.e turn the manpages for curl into a GUI for curl.
- lloeki 4y agooh, I completely missed that :facepalm:
- indigodaddy 4y agohttps://youtu.be/xH8rieN7aRI https://youtu.be/xH8rieN7aRI
- xmonkee 4y agoI recently got a Synology NAS and have been super impressed with their web based management interface (called the DSM). Every "app" has a UX for it.
- pitacracker 4y agoWhat does UX mean in this context?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xmonkee 4y agoUser Interface. I should've said UI, my bad.
- influx 4y agoI wish I could buy their software apart from the hardware.
- blattus 4y agoI think this is the idea behind Xpenology [0] [0] https://xpenology.org/#What_is_Xpenology https://xpenology.org/#What_is_Xpenology
- bogwog 4y agoI started using this recently when I installed Rocky Linux, since the installer had it as an option and I was curious. I still use ssh for the vast majority of what I need to do (partially out of habit), but my experience with Cockpit has been great. The SELinux app, which is a GUI for things like setroubleshoot, audit2allow, etc is definitely my favorite part.
- annoyingnoob 4y agoLooks like there is some overlapping text on the cockpit-project.org main page. https://ibb.co/hKrbbnF https://ibb.co/hKrbbnF Edit: If I keep refreshing the page, it renders correctly sometimes. Like 1 out of 4 or 5 refreshes look correct, with two columns of bullets.
- pacificresearch 4y agoCame here to say the same thing... happening in Chrome and FF
- freedomben 4y agoIf you haven't seen this before, you should definitely give it a try. I am a big CLI person but I still find it useful, especially for displaying/visualizing metrics/performance. If you're on a RHEL or Fedora base, it might be already installed and running. You just hit it on port 9090 with your web browser, and log in with your OS creds (same that you use for SSH). If it's not installed yet and/or you want to also add performance co-pilot[1], it's pretty easy to do: # Install cockpit and pcp and activate services dnf install -y cockpit pcp cockpit-pcp systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket systemctl enable --now pmlogger # If needed, open port 9090 in the firewall firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-service=cockpit # Alternatively you can open it for just your own IP firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-rich-rule='rule family="ipv4" source address="38.14.154.124" port protocol="tcp" port="9090" accept' Here's the same commands in a gist if preferred: https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/62b348ed45045e53356aeb7145cd209e https://gist.github.com/FreedomBen/62b348ed45045e53356aeb714... [1]: https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/feature-pcp https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/feature-pcp
- Iolaum 4y agoCockpit is awesome. Even though I am too a CLI person I use it heavily on my Rpi4 running Fedora IoT! Highly recommend it for people on the Fedora ecosystem!
- randomhodler84 4y agoNot just fedora or red hat flavors, it works great on most distros. Unified package management and updates, network and observability, podman and kvm… rocks, highly recommended
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
- skybrian 4y agoIt's going to be the same amount of change but delivered one at a time. What matters is how disruptive they are in aggregate, not when they happen.
- dang 4y agoRelated: Cockpit – Integrated, glanceable, web-based interface for servers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26197510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26197510 - Feb 2021 (126 comments) Cockpit – Web-based interface for Linux servers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22604560 - March 2020 (1 comment) 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) The Cockpit Project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14417256 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14417256 - May 2017 (1 comment)
- gigel82 4y agoThis comes included in Debian (and a bunch of other distros as well). I'm using it on a few home servers. I wish it had integrated support for containers (Docker, Podman); don't need anything fancy, but I have to set up Portainer as well just for managing those (start, stop, add a new docker, read logs, etc.)
- nerdbaggy 4y agoThere is now an official postman plug-in https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-podman https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit-podman
- freedomben 4y agoI'm nearly certain that cockpit does have integrated support for containers, although you may need to install an extra package to get it. In my setup scripts I have: dnf install -y cockpit cockpit-pcp cockpit-podman
- DakotaR 4y agoUnfortunately, they deprecated cockpit-docker in favor of Podman
- IceWreck 4y agoIt does have integrated support for containers. In cockpit, goto applications > podman and hit install.
- Jasper_ 4y agoOh hey, Cockpit; I remember when this was started. It was the Red Hat desktop team's skunkworks project to make an actual good server UI after the last few attempts failed; I can't find any evidence of it, but I swear there was this ridiculous project to generate a "Linux API" by automatically combining every other API and adding prefixes and headers. That came down from management since "APIs" were the hotness. The goal was to make in-roads on Windows Server-like deployments. "Cattle, not pets" was becoming uber-popular, but the thinking on the desktop team was that there was still a wide market for pets. People with toy servers, small businesses that just want a server inside their network, they all deserve UIs that don't require heavy sysadmin-ing. I think it turned out quite nicely, and it seems it's still going!
- tjscott 4y agoAre you thinking of Augeas? That was a project inside RH to parse nearly every config found in /etc, and be able to view and modify them all from a standard API.
- Conan_Kudo 4y agoWas? It still is: https://augeas.net/ https://augeas.net/
- Godel_unicode 4y agoGiven the latest release was 3 years ago, was seems appropriate. https://augeas.net/news.html https://augeas.net/news.html 1.12.0 - 2019-04-13
- bonzini 4y agoIt's basically a pluggable lexer, it is stable. And especially new config files have standardized on some variation of INI, Toml or YAML so there's less need for app-specific parsing.
- mongol 4y agoStill seems active on github https://github.com/hercules-team/augeas https://github.com/hercules-team/augeas
- splatzone 4y agoI might have missed something obvious, but I had trouble getting this installed on Ubuntu 20.04 - maybe the installation instructions need updated. The instructions[0] say it's included in Ubuntu 17.04 and later, but I couldn't see any way of enabling it. I tried installing with apt using the command they listed: . /etc/os-release sudo apt install -t ${VERSION_CODENAME}-backports cockpit But this didn't work. Eventually I read on another website that this is the correct way to install it: sudo apt install cockpit -y This probably would be obvious for most people - but since this software is all about improving server UX, I thought it was worth mentioning! [0]: https://cockpit-project.org/running.html#ubuntu https://cockpit-project.org/running.html#ubuntu
- paranoidrobot 4y agoI wouldn't recommend Cockpit on Ubuntu. Yes, you can get it installed and running pretty easy - however because Ubuntu does networking differently it wasn't able to do a bunch of things. Cockpit kept thinking the machine was offline, so wouldn't do software updates. It wouldn't do network management, because networking wasn't done in the way that Cockpit wanted. Yes, I could manually screw around and move from one type of network manager to another to make it work - but it wasn't easy, and easily broke networking on the machines. I ended up installing Fedora instead to get Cockpit working nicely.
- freedomben 4y agoI had no trouble at all running cockpit on ubuntu, but the Fedora experience is definitely super polished. I was blown away at how easy and useful it was.
- gerdesj 4y ago"I tried installing:" The first command you ran "sourced" a file - it basically read a file and set some environment variables - because that is what was in that file. The second one ran a command to install stuff and it referenced a variable - that variable was not mentioned in the sourced file. In general, when you install a package in Ubuntu or Debian you should not do anything more fancy than: $ sudo apt install <package> Don't put -y - you can then read any messages and make up your own mind what to do. If you know what you are doing then obviously use -y. You may find this handy: $ apt-cache search cockpit There are loads of web site scrapes these days relating to Linux stuff, just as Windows pioneered them years ago. Sign up to the forums for say Debian, Ubuntu, Arch and Gentoo and Mint, Fedora too. Don't rely on a general search unless you really know what you are looking for.
- rtsil 4y agoNice tool! I have an old personal dedicated server that has been running with Webmin for nearly 10 years, and Webmin is pretty thorough and actually helped me learn to manage servers with command line by exposing in a safer way all the config files. What are the biggest differences between the two ? Besides the fact Cockpit's probably not written in perl :-)
- platz 4y agoCloud providers give you good dashboards for your VM's. It makes sense that there should be something analogous for on-premise servers.
- pabs3 4y agoIs this anything like LuCi for OpenWRT based Linux systems?
- squarefoot 4y agoIt seems so. I hope Cockpit is small enough so one day it could replace LuCi as OpenWRT interface, also on smaller devices. I recall of some quirks with LuCi, such as the interface not synced to system files, so that one was forced to edit them by hand. Although I'm a Linux guy, I'm a fan of OpnSense and XigmaNAS, both BSD based, and their super clean, stable and efficient web UI which looks somewhat similar to Cockpit.
- pabs3 4y agoThe LuCi model is to generate the configs for a service from a separate config that the config generation system stores and the UI understands. Personally I think that is a terrible model, because if you want to set an option the config generation system doesn't set, there will be no documentation for that and you have to edit/trace the undocumented shell scripts that do the generation. A better model for this is Augeas (or Config::Model), which understand config files and offer a more sane API that allows you to modify them in-place.
- terrywang 4y agoStarted using Cockpit when installing Fedora 21 on the old dog NAS - HP ProLiant MicroServer N54l), it has been continuously improved over time and become a easy to use & robust Web UI for beginners (very intuitive, e.g. enabling metric collection will trigger toggling `pmlogger.service` and so on), even CLI warriors love it as a supplement. Found it a useful single point of view / administration covering networking, storage, virtualization, containerization, etc. when managing a small group of servers over nebula (overlay network), across home, multiple cloud service providers. Haven't used it at scale though, will dip into it when time comes (it supports FreeIPA).
- rcoder 4y agoCockpit is an impressively robust “server in a box” frontend for homelabs or my favorite, running on a little ARM SBC with a USB Ethernet gadget exported. Why is this a cool setup? B/c I can carry around a little Radxa Zero that looks like a USB-C Ethernet adapter to my iPad, Windows laptop, etc., and gets powered by the same port, and gives me Cockpit on a known local IP, mDNS advert, etc. It’s a pretty good “hacking on the plane/train/mountain” setup, if you’re ever in the mood to try such a thing. :) Edit/P.S.: why not just run a VM? See above re: iPad or other locked-down device; also, exposed GPIOs are useful sometimes too.
- theHNAcct 4y agoWhen I saw cockpit initially I thought it'd be a crutch that would atrophy my cli knowledge, your comment makes me see the great use case
- aetherspawn 4y agoWe recently made a new Red Hat server and it prompted us to enable this when we logged into SSH. Was very pleasantly surprised, and we used the web interface to configure everything, from VMs to bridging and bonding. Everything just worked really well. I'll admit though: it does feel a little "AJAX-ey" and it has this weird buggy/cheap feel that I don't get from i.e. Dell iDRAC or Enterprise switch interfaces. I think that is entirely because of the bootstrap-esque styling, and nothing to do with the way it works.
- jcastro 4y ago> weird buggy/cheap feel that I don't get from i.e. Dell iDRAC or Enterprise switch interfaces. Different strokes for different folks, to this I say THANK GOODNESS.
- oso2k 4y agoThe UI is based on a framework that is open source. It’s called PatternFly. https://www.patternfly.org/v4/demos/dashboard https://www.patternfly.org/v4/demos/dashboard
- nurettin 4y agoI used to manage single board computers behind home routers. I tunneled their ssh ports to a beacon vps instance using frp (more stable than autossh) to make a poor man's vpn and connected them all to cockpit. I think at the time the free version only allowed 15 connections, though.
- ocdtrekkie 4y agoWow! I had not heard of this before seeing this post, and I am now managing my Linux server with it as of now. This is way too convenient.
- mongol 4y agoI think Cockpit project seems really cool, I remember seeing a Youtube video from some conference when they explained how it was working. It was basically acting as some new type of terminal. But is it useful for non-RedHat-distributions? It seems quite tailored to that world.
- randomhodler84 4y agoYeah it works great on most distros. I run it on at least 5 different flavors of Linux and while the control panels are slightly different (if the feature set is not used on the OS), they all link up and you can use a single machine cockpit to laterally move to other cockpit instances. Works well for bastion hosts too. I’m a fan.
- mekster 4y agoI wish this tool was more useful but currently it's nothing but a simple dashboard and other parts are better handled inside a shell. Graphs, logs and stats are nothing actionable and package manager and service manager was kind of broken the last time I tried and it provides nothing better than command line by showing bunch of entries to make it hard to look at. Not sure what people use it for.
- lbriner 4y agoThe most obvious use-case is not having to login to 100 shells to do things like updates or manage keys but do them centrally from one place?
- mekster 4y agoYou could do that with Ansible or for a few dozens, you could open up tmux tabs and issue same commands to them all. The problem with cockpit is that it doesn't do anything better than specific tools making it rather useless.
- chr15p 4y agoAnsible and tmux require a lot more knowledge to be effective with than cockpit does, if you have that knowledge great, but if you have fairly low (linux) skilled first line support or junior sysadmins then giving them a gui lets them solve lots of basic issues without escalating.
- mekster 4y agoIt takes 30 minutes to figure out the tmux arguments to run commands in paraellel without leaving the terminal you know well. A limited GUI certainly causes more pain than the shell everyone uses.
- minimaul 4y agoI use Cockpit on isolated Debian Bullseye VM hosts to provide a UI to libvirt. It's very nice for that - it's minimalist, it doesn't get in the way of anything you want to do manually, and it doesn't wreck your VM configs if you just want to use it as a nice way to get console access. Highly recommend!
- tinco 4y agoI tried it on Ubuntu two years ago and it didn't feel very polished. I was able to create virtual machines and inspect basic metrics, but it would throw errors on about half of the features, assumed it was because it was built for RedHat and things were done differently on Ubuntu, or that I had simply done something incompatible in my manual configuration. Would you say all the features of cockpit work on Debian?
- minimaul 4y agoI only really use it for the VM features and for occasionally doing software updates, but those work reliably for me on Bullseye at least. edit: (it was fine on buster too) I've not tried it on Ubuntu at all - I've not used ubuntu personally since 6.06 or so!
- gkhartman 4y agoI use it for VM and Podman container management on Debian 11 without issue. Highly recommended.
- Havoc 4y agoHas anyone figured out how to add plugins? Not having any luck googling this
- randomhodler84 4y agoYeah install os packages like cockpit-machines cockpit-metrics for VM, observability etc.
- ParoxysmalVigor 4y agoUsed it mostly for cockpit-docker. Sadly, IBM decided to totally uproot (i believe their most popular) module to leverage podman over docker. First it was CentOS, now this.