8 ms·
Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers
- stego-tech 7mo agoI've used this before in the early days of my Linux SysAdmin work, especially in the homelab. It's pretty solid, but the limited amount of projects and lack of visibility into the CLI it uses on the backend hinder the ability to translate sysadmin work into tangible Linux skills, so I dumped it at home in favor of straight SSH sessions and some TUI stuff. That said, if I gotta babysit Linux in an Enterprise without something like Centrify? Yeah, Cockpit is a solid, user-friendly abstraction layer, especially for WinFolks.
- hosh 7mo agoPart of the technical assessment I have for hiring new platform engineers involves troubleshooting a service hosted in a headless Linux vm. Troubleshooting and fluency on the command line are among what I consider core skills. Being able to dig through abstraction layers is not just essential for when things go wrong, they are essential for building infrastructure, and really tells you whether an architecture is fit for purpose.
- dice 7mo agoOne of my favorite interview questions: "Here are some SSH credentials. What does this system do?" Sometimes there aren't any docs. Sometimes the docs are wrong. It's important to be able to establish what the actual running situation is.
- hosh 7mo agoGathering and mapping unfamiliar systems is part of that skillset. I’m also looking at being able to think laterally, being able descend abstraction layers, and understanding architectural characteristics and constraints (Roy Fielding’s Dissertation), which will recur at each level of abstraction.
- scorpioxy 7mo agoWhen I was interviewing people on behalf of a client, I was surprised at the number of people who didn't even know what SSH was. This was for a mid-level software developer and not a junior and they all came with glowing resumes. They all insisted that it was essential to have a CI/CD process but didn't even know what the "CD" part even did. Apparently you just "git push" and the code magically gets on the server. There are many ways to do deployments and a CI/CD process isn't always suitable and can have many forms, in my opinion, but I was happy to discuss any and all. But it's difficult to do that without the basics. As you said, before I was commissioned the platform had no documentation, was crumbling under tech debt and failing constantly so something like getting on the server to at least figure out what's going on was essential.
- baq 7mo agoYou’ve listed a whole gamut of reasons why having the process is essential, so they weren’t wrong ;)
- gerdesj 7mo ago# ip a # ss -tulpn # ps aux # df -h # apt install lnav # journalctl -f | lnav I'd probably ask you what would you like it to do (risking pissing you off) and then get on with trying to work out what is going on in the box. Mind you, my job title is MD, so I get that luxury.
- dwedge 7mo agoI went for a senior sysadmin interview role and they asked me to debug a website in the browser that was only visible on localhost, ssh was available. They asked me to double check that part because they assumed I just hadn't done that part, because apparently I was the first person who didn't need help with an SSH tunnel.
- stego-tech 7mo agoThere’s a lot of that going around, lately. I recently had an interviewer admit I was not in the first round of candidates sent for in-person finals, but they had all bombed out on very basic SSO questions despite having a decade managing Entra; I was a “second choice” candidate and the first one to correctly answer the broad strokes of setting up an SSO app, despite not having touched Entra since it was called Azure AD. I suspect this is AI’s doing, but cannot be sure. It’s really critical that technical interviewers weed out the over-inflaters though, now more than ever.
- dwood_dev 7mo agoThis predates AI. I've been interviewing candidates(SRE/DevOps) since 2018, so many candidates that claim to have extensive experience with things completely fall apart when you put them in front of a terminal.
- DrewADesign 7mo agoSure... but, I’ve got decades of experience doing that stuff, just not frequently enough to keep it in my head, these days. I usually want a small project server to just do shit and the less there is between that and booting up a fresh Linux install, the better. For example, I don’t keep firewall command line syntax in my head, but I know what needs to be done, and I always seem to need it with small home projects. I lose nothing by having a trustworthy gui do it. I’d give this a shot. I doubt I’d use it in a professional environment, but that’s not really my use case these days.
- hosh 7mo agoWhich goes to show, experience and maturity changes how people use tools. The person I was responding to was at an earlier maturity stage and realized it was hampering their growth I am more of a TUI person anyways. I have never found web based server management to be as responsive as TUI, same reason I prefer direct attaching than live tailing on a web tool. I configure my router through a web interface and not the command line either. It isn’t something I want to mess with on my downtime.
- stego-tech 7mo agoFrom a professional perspective, this is a solid question. And yeah, between the basic tool suite (top/cd/ls -l/df -H/grep/pipe '|'/ssh) and some common sysadmin/engie knowledge, I could get by with Linux just fine. "Just fine" doesn't cut it for troubleshooting sludgepipes and Kubernetes though, and my skills with Powershell finally gave me the confidence boost to take CLI/TUI seriously on Linux. And man, zero regrets. It's nice having an OS not fight me tooth and nail to do shit, even if it means letting me blow my feet off with some commands (which is why, to any junior readers out there, we always start with a snapshot when troubleshooting servers). Now to finish my mono-compose for my homelab and get back to enjoying the fruits of my labor...
- hosh 7mo agoI know there are some brilliant engineers at Microsoft. There are some incredible engineering in some components. I don’t know why Windows as a whole is such a piece of fractal shit. Maybe it is shinnegans like this: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-cybersecurity-government https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...
- stego-tech 7mo agoIt's the management structure focused on short-term gains and promotion cycles, combined with a corporate culture focused very much on the same as management with the added twist of politicking, backstabbing, and undercutting other teams. I've spent much of my life inside Microsoft's ecosystems. Not merely my career, but my technological life itself started with Win 3.11 on a parental laptop. I've spent so long in their orbit that I can generally infer what their latest thing does and how it works from an IT POV based on its product name alone, because I understand how Microsoft thinks from a marketing and engineering perspective. As you say, they have some truly brilliant folks in their ranks. Those few diamonds are buried under mountains of garbage and slop from above, though. I mean, this is the company who pioneered full-fat PC handhelds 20 years before the Steam Deck, the smart watch a full decade before Apple, the home media ecosystem years before streaming apps dominated, smartphones before the iPhone, I can go on and on. The problem isn't the engineers so much as corporate mismanagement, but they somehow survive like a cockroach based on install size alone.
- devnotes77 7mo ago[dead]
- girvo 7mo agoCockpit is great! My NAS (built on a weird “N17” AMD 7840HS laptop processor put into a desktop “server”mITX motherboard by those wizards in China) stuck in a Jonsbo N2 with 5x4TB Samsung 870 evos in ZFS raidz1 is entirely managed by it I keep meaning to look into making plugins for it, but honestly I’ve barely needed to. Cockpit, the 45drives ZFS plugin fork, and the web terminal have been more than enough for me
- Scene_Cast2 7mo agoSame here. Using it on two boxes, makes Linux sysadmin work easier.
- rovr138 7mo agoInteresting. This looks nice. Made me think of webmin which I used... years ago. Went to look and webmin's changed. Pretty crazy.
- spogbiper 7mo agoi used to set up webmin for the linux challenged admins so they could do basic tasks. it was nice because you could lock them to specific functions in certain modules and make it difficult for them to break things
- rovr138 7mo agoyeah! I had some things through there early on when I was building sites. I had some custom scripts that could also be triggered by the users.
- tombert 7mo agoI used Cockpit for years after I started having issues with my network card in FreeNAS. It's generally very good, though I never really figured out how to graphically swap out a hard disk in a RAID without trashing the data (which happened once). I suspect that was user error on my end, so if you want a more-or-less no-nonsense way to manager a server, it's certainly worth checking out.
- NewJazz 7mo agoDoes this work well with fleets? I remember looking at this early on it seemed fairly single-server focused.
- roscas 7mo agoI think they dropped multi server managment because it was possible to add a few servers but I guess they drop that one out. You do can logon into a server right on the logon page. That is nice.
- rwmj 7mo agoRed Hat wants you to use Ansible for that.
- esseph 7mo agoRed Hat wants you to use Satellite for that, which uses Ansible but also does other things based around package management.
- bravetraveler 7mo agoIt's pretty single-server focused... but there is a 'Multi Host' mode. One instance can use SSH to look at N systems [independently]. This consolidates the Cockpit endpoints you might need to use/ports to open... but doesn't give much in the way of orchestration. I believe when 'roscas' says this feature was dropped, they're talking about the requirement to enable 'AllowMultiHost'. As far as I know, this is still supported with some risk (according to the latest docs): https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/#secondary-auth https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/#secondary-auth
- bravetraveler 7mo agoDid some more reading, can't edit/correct; replying to myself! Found this: > This feature is deprecated as of Cockpit 322. Still works on 357 (Fedora 43)... so it's one of those "you can use it, but don't expect fixes" things, I guess. ref: https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/#multi-host https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/#multi-host
- plasticsoprano 7mo agoI tried this out about 2 months ago when setting up a new server. I wanted something simpler and less resource heavy as webmin but it was just too simple. Adding questionable, half baked add-ons to get various functions to work just didn't give me the flexibility of webmin.
- bityard 7mo agoI installed the latest Fedora Server on my Framework Desktop and noticed that Cockpit was enabled automatically. Overall impression is that its pretty good for getting a quick overview of things and you can certainly do _some_ administration with it, but you run into its limitations pretty fast trying to get any serious work done with it. It's probably great for those who are new to Linux and want that NAS-like admin web UI to get the basics set up as a stepping-stone before launching deep into the command line.
- baq 7mo agoA webui for creating vms is certainly convenient if you’re doing it once a year like me.
- roscas 7mo agoIt is very nice. I hope more apps and options are added as it makes very simple to do some admin tasks. Want to manage services? No problem, it is very easy. Clear failed and disable? Easy. Want to see some disks and do admin operations on disks? It does. Want a simple system monitor? It tracks cpu, ram and more in a pretty interface. RHEL is dropping old interfaces like cluster management and starting to use Cockpit only. I just wish Cockpit would replace Hawk2 for cluster management as it is better then the old deprecated cluster manager web interface. But yes, install Cockpit or keep it installed ready to be use cause one day it saves the day...
- jonym 7mo agothe opinion you didn't ask for: avoid admin UIs... at best they make you lazy, at worst a security nightmare
- dist-epoch 7mo agoIf you want people to self-host, this is a gateway to that.
- razakel 7mo agoAnd those who are actually curious will look into what it's doing under the hood. Everyone has to start somewhere.
- krior 7mo agoI just want to check from my phone how my home server is doing. Maybe someone else gets a perverse pleasure out of catting /proc/meminfo but I don't understand the need to make things more complicated than necessary.
- mastermage 7mo agothis exactly, is something alot of people on hackernews don't understand. Yes when you want to have the power you go in by ssh. But unlike some people I am not terminally on my thinkpad from 2010. And sometimes Its enough to just get a quick monitoring glance.
- teaearlgraycold 7mo agoTechnology is here to make us lazy
- hrmtst93837 7mo ago[flagged]
- grigio 7mo agoVery well done. For me cockpit is more than enough a mainstream proxmox
- poppafuze 7mo agoWhen it evolved a couple years ago to automatically set up the bridge for libvirt correctly, it had arrived. When that thing can set up pushbutton podman apps with decent net and persistence defaults it will be gold.
- Gabrys1 7mo agoI tried using this to handle my 10-ish Docker containers, but I ended up using Portainer. Sure, not the same thing, but if someone (like me) thought Cockpit might be nice for managing a small Docker host, this didn't work for me
- 9dev 7mo agoGoing for a shameless plug - I am working on an observability dashboard for Docker Swarm: https://github.com/Radiergummi/cetacean https://github.com/Radiergummi/cetacean Also works for a single node cluster. Maybe that’s closer to what you’re looking for.
- KronisLV 7mo agoHey that’s pretty cool, nice to see someone paying attention to Docker Swarm (it’s nice for simple deployments, like multi-server Compose). You might want to add some screenshots to the docs though. There was also Swarmpit but it didn’t really get that much love, sadly: https://github.com/swarmpit/swarmpit/issues/719 https://github.com/swarmpit/swarmpit/issues/719 Portainer is pretty nice feature wise but even with lowered MTU I still get odd networking related issues (seems like the agent or whatever cannot reach the manager sometimes) but I’ve had those sorts of issues across multiple different clusters, both in cloud and on-prem with single leader setups and across both RPM and DEB only clusters. Weird stuff, otherwise perhaps the most established solution for Docker Swarm.
- 9dev 7mo agoYeah, I was a long time Swarmpit user, but as you said it’s abandoned, has lots of unfixed bugs, and is pretty heavy. So I set out to build something light on Go to replace it. I love swarm! If only it wasn’t the unloved step child…
- mrlinx 7mo agocan you please add some screenshots?
- evanjrowley 7mo agoRipe for a supply chain attack. What safeguards do they have to protect against one?
- whatever1 7mo agoThe same that OpenSSL had with thousands of eyeballs looking at its source code for decades. Aka 0. Security is a theater for the amateurs.
- k_bx 7mo agoThe worst one is password based login it enables
- cozzyd 7mo agoWell you can use it via ssh so you don't have to open it up to the Internet directly.
- WorldPeas 7mo agocockpit has a great virtualization interface, in my opinion this alone makes it a better "buy" than truenas for a home server.
- tryauuum 7mo agoI had a bad experience with it. We hired a contractor and he 1. insisted on a pre-war version of ubuntu 2. insisted on the cockpit. So you no longer can modify the NFS exports over ssh, you need to connect to this HTTP abomination. Very nice. Always wanted to open more ports on my servers
- thomond 7mo ago> 1. insisted on a pre-war version of ubuntu Which war?
- teaearlgraycold 7mo agoPresumably the Snap War.
- tryauuum 7mo agoFebruary 2022 war
- teaearlgraycold 7mo agoSounds like you had a bad experience with a contractor.
- bookwar 7mo agoQuestion from a Cockpit PO: if you were to choose one feature to add to the project what that feature would be?
- mgartin 7mo agoA streamlined way to control "systemctl --user ..." without needing root auth.
- cprecioso 7mo ago- Easy OIDC - Generally improve the file manager addon - ncdu-like addon - interface to create simple systemd services - more visibility into which commands you can run to do the same thing
- Scene_Cast2 7mo agoSome more love for the updates page. E.g. select a subset of updates to install, be more clear that the last update time could be different if you installed updates via CLI, that kind of thing.
- xrd 7mo agoIncus support.
- ocdtrekkie 7mo agoI would love to resize drives/partitions on Linux machines without it feeling like open heart surgery, in a place I already have handy for generally poking around those machines.
- klaas- 7mo agofrom a company (RHEL users) POV: EntraID support -- we're using https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/devices/howto-vm-sign-in-azure-ad-linux https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/devices/how... for SSH at the moment (not really happy with it but I don't have a better alternate) -- and that does not work for cockpit. So another way to authenticate against entra would be nice for corporate users
- drnick1 7mo agoWhat is the use case for this over standard command line tools like systemctl, journalctl, top, docker ps?
- teaearlgraycold 7mo agoWeb UIs are nicer to deal with for simpler tasks. You can use this on your phone easily. Less technical users can be instructed on how to perform simple tasks like remotely powering off a machine.
- drnick1 7mo agoIs the overhead of such tools, and added attack surface, justified over sshing and issuing a shutdown command though?
- danparsonson 7mo agoWhat kind of attack are you anticipating? Surely only a fool or a madman would make such a thing publicly accessible.
- cozzyd 7mo agoYou can just run it via ssh anyway....
- bookwar 7mo agoThe main difference of Cockpit as opposed to more old school visual server administration tools that it doesn't replace standard server management approaches with its own configuration storage in some weird database. Edits which you make through cockpit and edits which you make through cli are exactly the same edits in same APIs. You do not need to choose one or the over. You can switch from one to the other seamlessly on a command by command basis.
- cozzyd 7mo agoI use it for certain use cases, where it definitely is more convenient. For example, adding a new user or adding an ssh key for a user or debugging SELinux issues.
- TimTheTinker 7mo agoI used Webmin[0] back in the day, I wonder how more recent server web UIs like Cockpit stack up. [0] https://webmin.com/ https://webmin.com/
- whalesalad 7mo agoIt's neutered and not as full featured, but not bad in a pinch. All of these web admin tools are hacks that call out to shell scripts and whatnot. It requires a lot of conditional behavior and/or vertical integration. "Linux" has no consistent API for control, so its all duct tape. Webmin is the same, tbh (swap perl for whatever cockpit is written in) 45Drives uses cockpit as the UI layer of their "Houston" operating system. https://www.45drives.com/community/articles/New-Operating-System-for-45Drives-Storage-Servers/ https://www.45drives.com/community/articles/New-Operating-Sy...
- EvanAnderson 7mo agoI looked at this and said "They've made Webmin again."
- mindwork 7mo agoI don't mind UI, but I think it's a bad approach. Instead of hiding all those complexities of the server behind UI, I would like to see each part of the application teach me how to achieve the same result in CLI. That would be useful for people to teach themselves, because UI comes and goes but basic linux commands - will stay
- handbanana_ 7mo agoComes and goes? Webmin would like a word
- nativeit 7mo agoI have been using Webmin/Virtualmin for all of my 15-years as a web host. I love it, although it can be a little idiosyncratic in places, once you know how to operate with it, you won’t ever need anything else. It’s never been the most bleeding-edge or fully-featured, but it’s also never fallen behind with security and compatibility updates, and it’s had a surge in new development lately, which is exciting. On a Debian system, it’s always been rock solid for me. Virtualmin in particular is more targeted towards production web servers, but I think they’re both something of a happy medium between a GUI and the terminal; The interfaces are all pretty explicit about the components you’re interfacing with, and nearly all of them include the ability to pop open the conf files to edit them directly. The extensive UI isn’t the most flashy or polished, but it’s functional and if you get bored enough (as I did) you can theme the entire thing with a single CSS file (be prepared for a lot of ‘!important’ and other things that will drive UI/X folks nuts), and make it look rather stylish. The only downside (and this isn’t really a downside for production servers) is it’s opinionated on how some things “should” be configured. It’s not restrictive, per se, but it’s not very tolerant for “coloring outside the lines”. You can run an Apache or Nginx reverse proxy, but if you want to use Caddy or Traefik or something similar, this may not be the admin panel for you. Myself, I just run Webmin/Virtualmin on my production servers, and use a separate server for Docker and apps, where I’ve used both Cockpit and Portainer, but generally tend to stick with the CLI. The command line will always be the best, most efficient way of interfacing with Linux. Once I’d learned enough to be comfortable, I found it becomes increasingly preferable for most common tasks.
- ElijahLynn 7mo agoWould be nice if the landing page had some graphical pictures for a graphical interface...
- bookwar 7mo agoTry https://cockpit-project.org/ https://cockpit-project.org/ :)
- bmurphy1976 7mo agoWhich is fine and all but repos with such sparse README's are not doing themselves any favors.
- rendaw 7mo agoIncluding images in a readme means committing (maybe large) binary files to the repo.
- hebelehubele 7mo agoThey could commit thumbnails linking to originals hosted on their website.
- theowaway213456 7mo agoThumbnails are not even needed - they can just use a plain old img tag in the readme with an external src.
- baq 7mo agoYes. One image won’t kill you. Or just refer an external static image.
- yonatan8070 7mo agoHow large are a couple of 1080p PNG screenshots? 0.5MiB?
- xrd 7mo agoI have used cockpit and like it. It allows me to quickly see the entirety of my system. But, it doesn't offer any way to review my incus containers. So, I tried wolfstack, which was recently listed on HN. It appears it only supports lxc. I'm surprised, isn't lxc and incus more or less 1:1 synonymous (unless you get into recent more complexities)? I'm feeling like it is hard to find a simple GUI to just review a system and manage a bunch of containers and VMs.
- bookwar 7mo agoWe do have a cockpit-podman plugin and have added recently some features to simplify management of podman quadlets. (podman quadlets is like a systemd-friendly version of docker compose, which is a good fit for a single server use case) So if you get onboard with podman, you may get some benefits from the Cockpit UI for it. But you are right, there are many different container technologies and we haven't catched up with all of them.
- chucklenorris 7mo agoI recently moved from a docker-compose setup with portainer as a manager to podman+quadlets+cockpit . After the initial pain of migration i'm really happy! I can also manage VMs, volumes, and check systemd logs so it's a good all-in-one solution for managing standalone servers. Also i think it uses systemd activation so it's really light on resources. For someone who dislikes the proxmox approach of custom kernel/os this is a good alternative.
- scorpioxy 7mo agoDo you mean LXD and Incus? If so, sort of. Incus is a fork of LXD but it diverged quite a bit and due to the LXD licensing change, Incus can't take anything from LXD but LXD can from Incus. Incus is a community project and is a lot more active. They both use LXC under the hood. Finding a simple GUI is not going to be easy because everyone has a different definition of what "simple" means. It also depends on what you mean by "review" and "manage". There were a few web UIs for LXD containers and they were ported or used for Incus containers. Some are still maintained and active. I personally prefer the command line and find it easier and simpler than using graphical interfaces so don't have a recommendation. When the number of containers and servers becomes large enough to warrant anything else, then that's when automation starts.
- samgranieri 7mo agoI use this in my homelab. I really appreciate the systemd logging functionality in Cockpit. It’s miles away from like Webmin, which I used god knows how long ago.
- MobileVet 7mo agoBut does it work on a Gibson??
- dxdxdt 7mo agoThe very first thing I remove when I install Fedora. It's such a bloat that only takes up space and memory for most people.
- Tepix 7mo agoI don‘t like the whole idea because it is less secure to have a web browser instead of a standard client. Think what an attacker could do if they take control of the server.
- mufasachan 7mo agoMe too, I set up a WG tunnel to access this.
- barchar 7mo agoUhhh what? If they take control of the server they have control over the box.
- jedberg 7mo agoDoes anyone else remember when someone ported kill to the DOOM engine? So you could fire up DOOM and kill processes using different guns for different kill levels? I don't know why but this reminded me of that.
- trevithick 7mo agoI need to know more about this.
- skirmish 7mo agoProbably [1], [2] [1] https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/ https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/ [2] https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html https://psdoom.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
- trevithick 7mo agoThanks. I like the spirit of this. I will not assume any liability for damage caused from running this code. Especially if you are running it as root. In fact, we both know that this will cause damage to the system, and that's why you want to try it. You have been warned.
- montroser 7mo agoReminds me of cpanel, from the late 1900s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPanel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPanel
- bookwar 7mo agoMy own early sysadmin experience was with Ubuntu eBox and I hated it. Because none of the expected configuration files or commands you would find on Stackoverflow would work on a eBox managed server. You would do configuration through the UI or nothing. The debugging was also impossible, because logs were not in the expected places and standard grep on log and conf files would give you nothing. Cockpit is way better than that. Partially because of systemd, but also dbus and other relatively new APIs in the Linux plumbing layer, which finally allowed us to implement consistent and stateless management UI of a system.
- whalesalad 7mo agoTrigger warning. This is taking me back to when I ran my own "web hosting provider" on a PIII with 128mb of ram back in the early 2000s (I was 13).
- saltyoldman 7mo agoCame here to say this too.
- qingcharles 7mo agoLate 1900s :( I still have to deal with CPanel as I have friends hosting their sites on GoDaddy which uses it extensively in 2026...
- vixalien 7mo agoI used to have this, but it takes up so much resources. not fit for small servers.
- andrewstuart2 7mo agoAs a certified graybeard (just literally graying on my beard now) who now prefers the CLI, I am SO GLAD that tools like this exist. I owe probably all of my high job satisfaction and higher income to the fact that I got to play around with Linux via Ubuntu (and Compiz Fusion via CCSM) and later Webmin and other tools I eventually played around with. I learned so much without realizing I'd be using it later, though IIRC it involved much swearing and gnashing of teeth. It's crazy to think that 20 years later so much of it comes naturally. Though I'm still learning just as much (with just as much swearing at the computer usually) every day.
- Heer_J 7mo ago[dead]
- pdntspa 7mo agoSooooo.... webmin?
- SlightlyLeftPad 7mo agoIs it worth switching off Komodo to this?
- bilekas 7mo agoI've come across this before. Maybe a few years ago, but the surface area was too high. How do you navigate your security ?
- cheema33 7mo agoFor the longest time I wanted to automated things with ansible. But it was a massive paint to plan/create new playbooks to manage servers and services. But now with Claude Code and other AI agents the ground has shifted. I have created a git repo that contains all my infra information minus credentials. Claude uses it to manage my infra using tools like terraform/tofu and Ansible. I also review the changes before they are pushed. And it is exceptionally good at debugging issues. If something breaks or starts acting weird I asked Claude to take a look and it can get to the bottom of it far quicker than me pocking around. Particularly when I get a call when I was sleeping.
- threecheese 7mo agoI’m on a similar trajectory. Claude is excellent at writing Dockerfiles, compose files, and operating docker. “Add a daily backup container to this compose file which writes to a new volume”, and it’s done. I also experimented with skill-creator to generate a skill for “operating” my chezmoi in a read only way, and now when I use Claude in a certain directory it tells me what needs to be updated and which commands to issue. I can see why people are worried about human skill decline!
- GabeIsko 7mo agoThis thing came by default on AlmaLinux, which I am evaluating for some HomeLab stuff. It's pretty neat! Definitely not a replacement for cotnainer management though - it is really more of a sysadmin portal where you can view services and open a terminal and such, but from a web console.
- uSpeedoAI33 7mo ago[dead]
- ikidd 7mo agoCockpit is rudimentary and hardly worth the time. And as far as I can tell, there's very little interest in expanding it from the broader community, as the lack of plugins would seem to indicate. It doesn't have a patch on Webmin, sadly.
- coreylane 7mo agoAgreed, I'd like to hear what actual tasks people are doing with it
- fourfour3 7mo agoI use it solely to give a webui for managing virtual machines on individual servers. It hooks into libvirt for this, so I can also manage them via virsh et al, but it's a nice tool to set up the essentials of a VM and provide remote access to the VM console.
- tcherasaro 7mo agoYeah, I used to use Virtualmin and webmin 10 years ago. Looks just like em!
- pippy 7mo agoI built a bit torrent extension for Cockpit. it was pretty fun building software for it
- swq115 7mo agoI run a small homelab (Mac Mini + RPi5) and tried Cockpit too. Great for single server monitoring, but once I had multiple nodes, I kept SSH-ing into each box anyway. Ended up wanting something CLI-first that could check all servers at once without opening a browser. The web UI is nice for a quick glance though.
- giancarlostoro 7mo agoIf you have a git repo for anything that's supposed to be an interface to anything, please put one screenshot at the top of your readme. I get that the website has these, but its the best way to let me know more about your product in one shot.
- eurticket 7mo agoAgreed. With a multi tab/page interface system like this, it would be nice to see a slideshow of different useful pages and nice data vis metrics. As an aside, GitHub made a change a while back where videos and gifs don't auto play without the user clicking play first. Boo.
- baq 7mo agoAgreed! I’m using cockpit on my home assistant box and I wasn’t even sure this is the same project since I log in with muscle memory.
- BobbyTables2 7mo agoAlso the first thing I uninstall on a new system.
- itslennysfault 7mo agocPanel reborn
- ocdtrekkie 7mo agoI have a handful of unique pet Linux machines at home and at work. The number one reason I love Cockpit is because I probably don't even remember which distro which is using, so it's really nice to have a common place I can establish a baseline when I know a given one of my machines is sad.
- INTPenis 7mo agoCockpit could actually get away with being a decent NAS interface. You can config storage, you can run VMs, containers from it. What else do you need?
- bean469 7mo agoYep, you can also create SAMBA shares, but I think that you need a plugin for it
- ramon156 7mo agoWhy not go for TrueNAS? Much more solid UI
- INTPenis 7mo agoTo keep it simple, just install Fedora or RHEL and you have a NAS already. I'm not saying one is better than the other, just that there is now finally an appeal in Cockpit to be used as a NAS. I've been following its development for almost 10 years.
- recov 7mo agoThis is what I do. I'd rather have a linux machine with a webUI on top like this than a full blown proxmox/truenas/unraid set up (for now). I never expose my NAS to the internet, other than wireguard/tailscale, so an admin console on a port never really bothered me.
- sachahjkl 7mo ago[flagged]
- iqandjoke 7mo agoI remember Tenable used it. Not sure if Tenable contributes back into this project.
- ExoticPearTree 7mo agoThey still do. Just set up a few of their Nessus images a few weeks ago.
- thunderbong 7mo agoI've used Cockpit and quite like it. Very clean way to get the full picture of the system. However, I was wondering if there was any way to login using an SSH key rather than a password? I could of course pipe it via SSH. But is there any way we can authenticate using SSH on the web? Maybe someone here can help?
- znpy 7mo agoAll the supported login methods are in here: https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/authentication https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/authentication
- thunderbong 7mo agoThank you!
- jbethune 7mo agoThis is super cool. Wish I had this back in my sysadmin days.
- icar 7mo agoPSA: The file browser plugin can't move files (you need to copy, paste, and go back and delete the original file). You can't select multiple files without a keyboard. You can't upload multiple files at the same time. Mobile screen has lots of usability issues, specially with long paths or filenames.
- worksonmine 7mo agoThese all sound like tasks a real sysadmin wouldn't attempt. File browser on a server? Use mv and you can move as many files as you want, sure you'd need a keyboard but I don't see how I would do it with mouse only. Right-click and select multiple? I don't know but it's not a feature I'd even thought of. Cockpit is great to get a quick glance at the state of servers, but for actual work the terminal is more convenient. Appreciate it for what it is and don't expect a full desktop environment to be included.
- icar 7mo agoIt changes permissions nicely and it's nice for my Fedora NAS Jellyfin Torrent server management. It comes preinstalled. Everything that I listed would make the software better.
- carlosjobim 7mo agoI'm a person who actually uses these graphical interfaces for servers, starting with cPanel. I've never found any better interface than Fastpanel: https://fastpanel.direct https://fastpanel.direct I'm not ashamed of shilling it. It's made managing servers and sites a pleasure instead of an exercise in teeth-grinding. Yet I never see it mentioned anywhere online when the subject comes up, even though the license is free.
- Havoc 7mo agoI’ve learned to avoid these sort of webui management platforms. They seem to always follow the classic „add pro tier, need to make money“ trajectory So try to stick to cli for things that aren’t unreasonable to manage by hand (eg docker)
- giancarlostoro 7mo agoAnother reason I've wanted to build one for a while, but no time. There used to be one that was GPL licensed that was even on Debian repos but I forget the name.
- tom-blk 7mo agoFirst time hearing about this, have been terminal-bound for a while for most of my workflow, but am curious to try it
- ballstein 7mo agoNo screenshot is criminal
- jefftrebben 7mo ago[flagged]
- alfanick 7mo agoI'm using it since a couple of months, I wanted a web-GUI that looks modern, so not installing Webmin anymore in 2026. Cockpit has some basic functionalities, one of them is "it just works". Supports 2FA via PAM, it's a decent fronted to podman containers, easy to go through journald logs, has some plugins but some are of the lower quality, terminal works great, basic systemd service management, super nice metrics via PCP (initially I liked the metrics, didn't know about PCP before, started some other project based on PCP, just because I learned about it).
- muin_kr 7mo ago[flagged]
- nextaccountic 7mo agoIt looks like this manage each application run in the server as systemd services. It's also very integrated to systemd internals (view logs through systemd journal, etc). Can this also manage containers? In the guide https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/ https://cockpit-project.org/guide/latest/ I don't find anything about managing containers