Portainer, a UI for Docker | Hacker News Reader

Portainer, a UI for Docker

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90 pointsrussmck28 comments

The lineage:

DockerUI - Created by Michael Crosby, later handed off to me when he got busy at Docker. The goal was to provide parity with the Docker command line, no extra features.

UI for Docker - Rename of the same project due to trademark concerns

Portainer - Fork of the original codebase with an expanded feature scope. I started losing interest in keeping up with Docker features when they added native Swarm, combined with a job change it was a good time to hand off the torch to someone else. It looks like they're trying to make a company out of it, I'm interested to see if they can make it happen.

Thanks Kevan, the work of Docker UI was legendary, however, as you pointed out, development slowed. We initially built portainer for our own internal use (as the UI for CloudInovasi.id), but liked it so much, we decided to focus on it. We are now wanting to add substantially more capability so that it becomes truly production ready. There will be a select few paid add-on's in the future for things like AD authentication, multi-tenancy etc, but the core will always be opensource and free.

I'm not really sure on how this can move beyond a "good to have" UI on my dev machine. In production I'd always want a more wide-scoped dashboard like the one in K8s or Marathon.

This. I evaluated Portainer recently and found myself missing a few critical features available from Marathon.

Such as? Let us know what we are missing, and we can look at adding it.. remember tho, we are not trying to be a replacement for Swarm, we believe swarm service orchestration to be a winner, so are supporting that (as opposed to rancher, kuber etc who have their own cluster solution).

The way I would look at it at the moment is that it provides a nice self-service interface allowing you give people access to deploy containers on dev servers which may free up time to allow you to concentrate on managing production.

how is this different then shipyard -> https://shipyard-project.com/

i would love to be able to add docker-compose file and it would create everything for me ( something like rancher ). shipyard does not support this and with rancher i abounded it after running into problems.

Both Portainer and Shipyard currently occupy the same space. While there is no Docker Compose support at the moment, however, you can add customisable templates, see https://portainer.readthedocs.io/en/stable/templates.html for more info.

Also, they do eventually plan for Portainer to compete with Rancher https://twitter.com/portainerio/status/814542425410576386

shameless plug, I've developed an HTTP API (plus a minimal web interface) on top of docker compose: https://github.com/francescou/docker-compose-ui , it shold be fully compatible with the docker-compose CLI.

We are adding support for compose YAML files in the Feb/March timeframe.. you will simply upload a yaml file, which portainer will then use to create containers/services

Why should I use this instead of Kubernetes?

As far as I understand, this is 'only' a UI layer on top of Docker and Docker Swarm. So this doesn't tackle any of the problems which Kubernetes (or Docker Swarm, for that matter) would, like scheduling and service discovery. Two very different things, really.

We are adding "tasks or jobs" in Feb/March timeframe, which will allow you to schedule any portainer task (such as scaling up or down a service). Swarmmode really does make service discovery a lot simpler, no need for Consul etc.

That's great to hear, I hope the best for the project! I meant 'scheduling' in the cluster management sense (which containers run in which nodes), though.

Is there a similarly simple and rich UI for Kube?

Kubernetes Dashboard - http://blog.kubernetes.io/2016/07/dashboard-web-interface-fo...

I think the official Web UI for K8s gets very close to: http://kubernetes.io/docs/user-guide/ui/

Tectonic by CoreOS comes with a console. See screenshots at the bottom of the page: https://tectonic.com/

    cockpit-kubernetes.x86_64 : Cockpit user interface for Kubernetes cluster
    cockpit-docker.x86_64 : Cockpit user interface for Docker containers
    cockpit-storaged.noarch : Cockpit user interface for storage, using Storaged

would love to see a curses (cli) based UI for managing images/containers (not aware of any).

I am fairly certain I've used one, do not recall the name.

Edit: https://github.com/TomasTomecek/sen

if you use docker from terminal, why would you need anything else than you have already? current docker commands are pretty easy and intuitive IMO.

Can anyone point me to the best argument for hiding complexity instead of eliminating it?

Sometimes you want it (lots of config options) and sometimes you don't. In the real world, you need the detail available for strange edge cases but generally are happy with mostly-defaults.

We wanted portainer to mask the underlying complexity of Docker, without totally removing the functions that is making Docker legendary. Its a balancing act between hiding and removing compexity, but thats what makes UX design.

@ncresswell, more create and update capabilities would be great (e.g. the ability to create a network, connect a container, etc.)

Betteridge's law, something for headline writers to be aware of?

It's pretty well-known!

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=betteridge&sort=byDate&prefix&...

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