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Show HN: Portainer – A lightweight management UI for Docker (portainer.io)
146 points by deviantony 3515 days ago
16 comments

Nice UI. But my mainproblem is not solved with an UI.

I did not understand who uses only default containers without configuration or only the small possible container configurations? For such people a default UI is perfect.

E.g. Containers with Linked Data-Containers to store the Data outside of a container, or setting up a container with different parameters (company/server specific). For such things i need an extra system which can not be used with your or any other UI.

We build our own small template system to manage Domains, Subdomains and the setup of the software within a container. How could this be connected to your UI?

It would be great if your Template-System will integrate an API, so really configurable Templates will be possible. Allow external Scripts, or better access to an Rest-Api to get configurations. This will be a huge advantage over other standard UIs.

> E.g. Containers with Linked Data-Containers to store the Data outside of a container, or setting up a container with different parameters (company/server specific). For such things i need an extra system which can not be used with your or any other UI.

What ways are you injecting new data in? This service appears to support environment variables (which sounds right for setting up a container with different parameters) and volumes, do those not meet your needs? I'm always slightly hazy on the volumes-from data-container pattern so perhaps not.

The ENV vars for a container are part of the standard docker system, they work as expected and are supported by many UIs.

I mean how dynamic data come into the Container from the UI, when you setup a new container? I use the data to setup the container, get letsencrypt certificates, update nginx proxy, add to backups, ....

Example: I setup a new Apache+PHP-Container with Domain xyz.com, now i want to add a subdomain abc.xyz.com. How can i do that with the UI and automatically inform my other components about the changes. That is what i mean with, that the UI solve not this problem for me and it has no API to connect. Or their template system is not flexible enough to handle such things.

Currently my data is stored in conf files and i use some custom scripts to create / update the docker containers, update proxy, ....

A similar project[1] which is also open source[2] and looks a lot similar.

[1] https://shipyard-project.com/

[2] https://github.com/shipyard/shipyard

Hey there ! We have a comparison table on our website: http://portainer.io/portainer-comparison.html

The main advantage against shipyard is that you only need to deploy one container to run Portainer, it's really simple and quick. Shipyard deployment is more complex.

That comparison looks inaccurate. Shipyard does support tagging images. Also will support Swarm [1] mode (and volume/ network support)

[1] https://github.com/shipyard/shipyard/pull/837

Thanks, I will update the comparison table. I did not include 'next' features in the table :)
Have you ever thought about adding support for kvm/QEMU/virsh-based virtual machines as well? I've been looking for a easy to use interface that gives a comprehensive overview of virtual machines as well as containers as I'm often using a mix of both.
At the moment, we are focussed purely on docker containers... Our mantra, focus on one thing and do that one thing better than anyone else
Cockpit [1] too, although that might be a bit more focused on single machine management than on clusters (don't use any of those - so I can't tell for sure)

[1] http://cockpit-project.org/

Well, it seems to cover the same functionality! But there is no windows support and does run in the shell instead of a docker image.
Opensource incase anyone was wondering: https://github.com/portainer/portainer
Is this commercial? Open source? I managed to find the github repository[1]. While it is linked to on the homepage, it isn't all that discoverable. From there, it looks like this is licensed until a BSD-like (zlib) license. If that's the case, what's the model for this? Is there a commercial offering coming, or is it really just an open-source management engine?

[1] https://github.com/portainer

Hi there, we are releasing portainer as opensource, with a paid support option available for people running in production. In the future we also plan to offer paid plugins/extensions, to support things like LDAP authentication. The core functionality will always be free and always open source.
It looks absolutely amazing! Is it compatible with swarm mode? It would be awesome if it was a bit more explicit that it was running on a swarm/which node...
Thanks a lot ! It is indeed compatible with Swarm mode and allows you to manage your services. A lot of work is currently in progress on this part ! Feel free to try it and give use some feedback :)
Main developer here, feel free to ask any questions :)
So, here's a concern for you: this provides for a severe security hole, since it has the ability to effectively run as root on any machine its connected to (a'la privileged mode, volumes, network, leaking secrets through environment variables). It might be worthwhile to find a way to mitigate that security hole, or add some serious access control restrictions.

I wouldn't be too surprised if your test cluster machines are frequently rooted.

Thanks for the feedback ! We will indeed investigate any potential security holes. We're also working on AC restrictions at the moment.
Saw it, loved it, installed in only 30 seconds, now using it in production. There are definitely issues to be resolved but I believe most of them are simple enough for single commits.

It should be noted that this project still lacks proper access management. There is no authentication either. You can set up Basic Auth but it feels dirty in my opinion. Guard it behind your firewall if you are gonna use it in production.

Kudos

Was able to set it up in under 30 seconds - kudos to you!

Really looking forward to the docker-compose support, though. I like the combination of docker-compose + traefik + labels. :)

We currently use DockerUI on our instances. What would be the compelling reason to switch to Portainer?
Our work is based on DockerUI, we do have a few extra features not implemented in DockerUI yet (container console for example), Swarm support and Portainer works well with Docker for Windows.
We used DockerUI as our initial inspiration and codebase, but have added so many more features, and make it so much cleaner... If you are using DockerUI, then switching to portainer should be an easy choice
Thanks! I started using it on two machines already, no problems so far. It's great that it runs from a single Docker container without any stupid "curl | sudo bash" scripts.
I see real time stats, do you have support for log retention?

Say I don't wanna ship logs elsewhere, can I define a retention period and check out logs locally?

ty

Will there be a OSX (MacOS) version? It's quite rare for software to have Windows and Linux support, but no OSX support.
I tried the instructions for Linux on a Mac: https://portainer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/deployment.html#c.... (I'm guessing the developers simply haven't tested on Mac) So far, it seems to work. My guess is that the developers haven't had a chance to test on a Mac and just don't want to make any claims just yet.
This is awesome ! Indeed we don't have any Mac and so we did not have the possibility to try it. We'll ask a few Mac users to give it a go before claiming Mac support. Thanks a lot !
Great work. Thanks. Do you have a roadmap for the future?
Our public roadmap is available here: https://github.com/portainer/portainer/projects/2

There's not so much content in it at the moment, but we plan to work on it this week :)

Anthony and I plan to get together next week to map out our vision, so expect to see a roadmap published on the main portainer website very soon
Any plans to release a Mac version?
It's like Rancher but for Docker Swarm (or just a host with Docker). I really like it! We run our own container registry for our engineering group based on Artifactory. Could this be made to work with that (or even Quay)? [EDIT]Actually I just deployed this and saw that you can support other registries out of the box. Cool!
I agree. Rancher has too many balls in the air. They are trying to support Cattle, Swarm, Mesos, Kubernetes...

As a result they aren't terribly good at anything (The UI is insanely slow). Other specialized tools that just focus on one orchestration framework could zoom past Rancher. Look at the Kubernetes UI in 1.4.

Very Cool!

1. Is there some auth mechanism like Shipyard where I can make new users and set their access scopes?

2. Can you please mention the source code on your page? It is nowhere to be seen (https://github.com/portainer/portainer).

Thanks !

Role based access control is our next big feature on the roadmap, we're working on it :)

And yes, there is a link to the source code on the homepage.

Toward the bottom of the page, there is a link to the source code under the title "OPEN SOURCE."
We have just pushed Portainer release 1.10 to DockerHub. Release notes are here: https://github.com/portainer/portainer/releases/tag/1.10.0
Looks great, and certainly ticks a lot more boxes than the others in your comparison matrix!

Glad to see that you say services are being worked on. I see that as a good area to push forward on in Docker land.

No; that Portainer is for, in short, running `docker build` tasks remotely on a Mesos cluster. Unrelated work, same ecosystem.

Both projects just named themselves based on an extension of the shipping-container analogy - "things that help manage lots of containers".

Just an unfortunate coincidence that we used the same name... We are totally unrelated to that project
Love the art style, love the site style, maybe useful as a desktop app for local development too perhaps?
Thanks ! A desktop app is not in the roadmap at the moment. Portainer is built to be easy to deploy and you just need to deploy one container to get it running so it can really be useful to manage local development environments :)
Is there a Docker image to run Portainer? Can it then create docker containers inside itself?
Very cool. Simple enough for me to use as opposed to large MNCs
Beautiful website. IMO, please use a solid colour for the contact form section at the end. Much better that they are usable than 'look nice'.
I like the UI. Great work. Kudos!