Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers

First time hearing about this, have been terminal-bound for a while for most of my workflow, but am curious to try it

I 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.

No screenshot is criminal

I’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)

Would be nice if the landing page had some graphical pictures for a graphical interface...

Cockpit 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?

I 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

I used Webmin[0] back in the day, I wonder how more recent server web UIs like Cockpit stack up.

[0] https://webmin.com/

I 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.

I'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.

Reminds me of cpanel, from the late 1900s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPanel

Cockpit 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

If 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.

I 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.

Interesting. This looks nice. Made me think of webmin which I used... years ago.

Went to look and webmin's changed. Pretty crazy.

I 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.

PSA: 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.

I'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?

Question from a Cockpit PO: if you were to choose one feature to add to the project what that feature would be?

This 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.

The very first thing I remove when I install Fedora. It's such a bloat that only takes up space and memory for most people.

Cockpit 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.

I remember Tenable used it. Not sure if Tenable contributes back into this project.

What is the use case for this over standard command line tools like systemctl, journalctl, top, docker ps?

It 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...

Does 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.

I 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.

I built a bit torrent extension for Cockpit. it was pretty fun building software for it

I 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

Yeah, I used to use Virtualmin and webmin 10 years ago. Looks just like em!

This is super cool. Wish I had this back in my sysadmin days.

Does this work well with fleets? I remember looking at this early on it seemed fairly single-server focused.

For 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.

Ripe for a supply chain attack. What safeguards do they have to protect against one?

I'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

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.

I 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.

I've come across this before. Maybe a few years ago, but the surface area was too high. How do you navigate your security ?

I 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.

cockpit has a great virtualization interface, in my opinion this alone makes it a better "buy" than truenas for a home server.

I used to have this, but it takes up so much resources. not fit for small servers.

Also the first thing I uninstall on a new system.

I 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.

Is it worth switching off Komodo to this?

the opinion you didn't ask for:

avoid admin UIs... at best they make you lazy, at worst a security nightmare

But does it work on a Gibson??

As 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.

When 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.

Very well done. For me cockpit is more than enough a mainstream proxmox