Well, can’t say fairer than that.

Yeah, I did try to stress that just because I can’t envision a use for it, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist. I’m totally OK with that. My question was more “Am I the idiot here for not being able to see what the use is?”

Obscurity is not the same thing as security.

You know those can be self hosted, right?

And yes, by all means just set up your own Wireguard or OpenVPN access if that’s what you prefer. You do you bud.

But that implies you do have your SSH open to the world, right?

The way I access my private web interfaces remotely is through something like Netmaker, Tailscale or Zerotier. Same thing for SSH. No way in hell am I opening 22 on my router.

I’ll admit, as neat as this is, I’m a little unclear on the use case? Are there really situations where it’s easier to get a command prompt than it is to open a webpage?

The CLI side I can see more use for since that does expose a lot of actions to bash scripting, which could be neat. But on the whole I can’t say I’ve ever really found myself thinking “Man, I really wish I had a UI for managing Radarr, a program that already includes a really good UI.”

I know it’s shitty to hate on something just because you’re not the target for it. That’s not my intent, it’s more that I’m just fascinated by the question of how anyone has a burning need for this? It feels like there must be something I’m missing here.

Please don’t use Portainer.

• It kidnaps your compose files and stores them all in its own grubby little lair
• It makes it basically impossible to interact with docker from the command line once it has its claws into your setup
• It treats console output - like error messages - as an annoyance, showing a brief snippet on the screen for 0.3 seconds before throwing the whole message in the shredder.

If you want a GUI, Dockge is fantastic. It plays nice with your existing setup, it does a much better job of actually helping out when you’ve screwed up your compose file, it converts run commands to compose files for you, and it gets the fuck out of the way when you decide to ignore it and use the command line anyway, because it respects your choices and understands that it’s here to help your workflow, not to direct your workflow.

Edit to add: A great partner for Dockge is Dozzle, which gives you a nice unified view for logs and performance data for your stacks.

I also want to note that both Dockge and Dozzle are primarily designed for homelab environments and home users. If we’re talking professional, large scale usage, especially docker swarms and the like, you really need to get comfortable with the CLI. If you absolutely must have a GUI in an environment like that, Portainer is your only option, but it’s still not one I can recommend.