Portainer VS filemanager

Portainer is a container management platform that provides a powerful web interface to administer your workloads. It natively supports Kubernetes environments to help you manage your Pods, Deployments, Helm charts, and other cluster resources. Portainer also provides robust RBAC capabilities and an external authentication layer, letting you grant team members access to Kubernetes through Portainer without directly exposing your cluster.

This episode is actually why I started this series in the first place. I am an active Docker user and Docker fan, but I like containers and DevOps topics in general. I am a moderator on the official Docker forums and I see that people often struggle with the installation process of Docker CE or Docker Desktop. Docker Desktop starts a virtual machine, and the GUI is to manage the Docker CE inside the virtual machine even on Linux. Even though I prefer not to use a GUI for creating containers, I admit it can be useful in some situations, but you always need to be ready to use the command line where all the commands are available. In this episode I will use Ansible to install Docker CE in the previously created virtual machine, and I will also install a web-based graphical interface, Portainer.

Portainer

> Any tips on the minimum hardware or VPS's needed to get a small swarm cluster setup?

From my testing, Docker Swarm is very lightweight, uses less memory than both Hashicorp Nomad and lightweight Kubernetes distros (like K3s). Most of the resource requirements will depend on what containers you actually want to run on the nodes.

You might build a cluster from a bunch of Raspberry Pis, some old OptiPlex boxes or laptops, or whatever you have laying around and it's mostly going to be okay. On a practical level, anything with 1-2 CPU cores and 4 GB of RAM will be okay for running any actually useful software, like a web server/reverse proxy, some databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL/MariaDB), as well as either something for a back end or some pre-packaged software, like Nextcloud.

So, even 5$/month VPSes are more than suitable, even from some of the more cheap hosts like Hetzner or Contabo (though the latter has a bad rep for limited/no support).

That said, you might also want to look at something like Portainer for a nice web based UI, for administering the cluster more easily, it really helps with discoverability and also gives you redeploy web hooks, to make CI easier: https://www.portainer.io/ (works for both Docker Swarm as well as Kubernetes, except the Kubernetes ingress control was a little bit clunky with Traefik instead of Nginx)

In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:

Git issues pointing to: https://docs.portainer.io/v/ce-2.9/start/install/agent/swarm/linux gives a ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS.

I am currently running Portainer, but webhooks (GitOps) appear to be broken ( [2.19.0] GitOps Updates not automatically polling from git · Issue #10309 · portainer/portainer · GitHub ) and so I cannot send webhook to redeploy a stack. So, looking for alternatives. Using this as a good excuse to learn more about docker and CI/CD etc.

A Synology NAS running Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) running Paperless NGX (https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx)

This works better than I can possibly tell you.

I have an Epson WorkForce ES-580W that I bought when my mother passed away to bulk scan documents and it scans everything, double-sided if required, multi-page PDFs if required, at very high speed and uploads everything to OneDrive, at which point I drag and drop everything into Paperless.

I could, thinking about it, have the scanner email stuff to Paperless. Might investigate that today.

Paperless will OCR it and make it all searchable. This setup is amazing, I love living in the future.

> I've come to the conclusion (after trying kops, kubespray, kubeadm, kubeone, GKE, EKS) that if you're looking for < 100 node cluster, docker swarm should suffice. Easier to setup, maintain and upgrade.

Personally, I'd also consider throwing Portainer in there, which gives you both a nice way to interact with the cluster, as well as things like webhooks: https://www.portainer.io/

With something like Apache, Nginx, Caddy or something else acting as your "ingress" (taking care of TLS, reverse proxy, headers, rate limits, sometimes mTLS etc.) it's a surprisingly simple setup, at least for simple architectures.

Checkout https://awesome-selfhosted.net/tags/file-transfer---web-base...

I've used https://filebrowser.org/ and it's okay. I've also Seafile, but my current setup is sftp clients (Transmit nowadays) and Syncthing if I need the files on multiple computers.

File Browser

Thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware of dufs and it looks very solid. Fileserver[0] is another popular choice, though it's more GUI-oriented for file operations.

[0]: https://filebrowser.org/

The OnlyOfffice desktop app is a pretty good and free alternative to Microsoft Office Suite. You can simply install it on your local machine for offline access.

OnlyOfffice is also self-hostable as a web app for a cloud alternative to Google Sheets.

Filebrowser is a self-hostable alternative to Google Drive.

There's a pull request open to integrate OnlyOffice with Filebrowser for self-hosted google-drive + google docs.

https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser/pull/1420

For strictly local use, Google's Nearby share is technically FOSS but the documentation is basically non-existent and a proper Linux implementation is not here yet. Alternatives aren't hard to find though, with Mint's Warpinator or KDE Connect having worked well for me.

For non-local use (everything out of Bluetooth range), you almost have to trust a third party and it really depends on your use case. Want to send your friend a file or host pictures of your birthday for multiple people to download? For the former magic wormhole works great, for the later you could almost spin up a nextcloud or similar (personally I like https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser ). Want to regularly send files from device 1 to device 2? Now classic sync solutions like syncthing become really viable.

If everything else fails, FTP always has your back

I have been looking for a file browser which can run in game mode and is reasonably user friendly for simple file operations (copy/delete/rename, etc). Most people recommend Dolphin. it does work but there are issues: the color scheme looks really weird in game mode. context menu does not like game mode, either. Got file browser working (https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser) in game mode, which essentially an Edge app accessing a web server on localhost (running as user service). It took some time to set up but the end result is exactly what I would like to have.

File Browser - For access to the files on my NAS

filebrowser has user management plus sharing capabilities

Filebrowser suppports multiple shares with different expiration dates. It also offers file previews and generates QR Codes for the shares.