ctop VS Portainer

This does remind me of ctop as well: https://github.com/bcicen/ctop

It also let's you look at containers, resource usage graphs, their logs and even do some actions through a TUI.

ssh, nnn, micro and ctop is all I need on my dockerhosts

My problem with ctop is, that it seems to show wrong memory usage data: https://github.com/bcicen/ctop/issues/314

When talk about interface and cli... I am a huge fan of ctop

You can use CTOP. It's like a lite portainer on CLI. You can check logs, stats, restart containers.

In the terminal, there are also a few useful projects:

  - for Docker, there is ctop: https://github.com/bcicen/ctop

> I tried portainer, awful UX experience and all good features are inside paid version.

This is interesting to me, because it doesn't quite match my experience - I've been using Portainer for around 3 years at this point and it's been pretty decent.

The worst issues that I've gotten is networking issues in some hybrid configurations with Docker Swarm (e.g. Portainer cannot reach the manager node of the cluster for a bit), or troubles configuring Traefik ingresses when managing Kubernetes (though I think the recent patch notes talked about improving the ingress section, so maybe the experience will get better with non-Nginx ingresses).

Other than that, it's been great for onboarding new people, illustrating the cluster state at a glance, easily operating with stacks and scaling/restarting services as needed, including pulling new images, viewing the logs or even connecting to containers through a web UI if need be. The webhook functionality in particular is really nice - you can just do a curl request against a given URL and that will pull the new container versions for the given image and do a redeploy, which works nicely with a variety of CI solutions.

When I last tried, initializing Nomad clusters with networking encryption was a bit less of a smooth experience (needing to essentially manage your own PKI) and the web UI felt more like a dashboard, instead of something that you could click around in, if you're a proponent of that workflow.

Rancher is probably better than both of those options, though there's a certain overhead in regards to running both that software and a full Kubernetes cluster. If Kubernetes feels like a good fit for a particular project and resources aren't an issue, definitely check it out! You can, of course, also have some success with lightweight clusters, like K3s: https://k3s.io/

I'll definitely agree that Lazydocker is a nice tool, but I wouldn't call it superior, just different (TUI vs GUI), their demo video is nice though: https://youtu.be/NICqQPxwJWw

It actually reminds me of ctop, which you might also want to check out, though it's not something that you'd manage clusters in, merely the individual containers on a node (which won't always be enough, same as Docker Compose isn't): https://github.com/bcicen/ctop

Regardless, for Kubernetes, I'm inclined to say that you'd enjoy k9s a bunch then, it has a similar TUI approach: https://k9scli.io/

However, something like ctop may be easier to use.

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.

casaos it just makes things like backups, offsite syncing and many other nas related things so much easier to manage. And gives you a proper nas like experience similar to that in which you'd fine on companies like tnas or synology. I actually also use it as a replacement for portainer when i don't need the more advanced features it offers

> I moved to docker swarm and love it. It's so much easier, straight forward, automatic ingress network and failover were all working out of the box. I'll stay with swarm for now.

I've had decent luck in the past with the K3s distribution, which is a bit cut down Kubernetes: https://k3s.io/

It also integrates nicely with Portainer (aside from occasional Traefik ingress weirdness sometimes), which I already use for Swarm and would suggest to anyone that wants a nice web based UI: https://www.portainer.io/

Others might also mention K0s, MicroK8s or others - there's lots of options there. But even so, I still run Docker Swarm for most of my private stuff as well and it's a breeze.

For my needs, it has just the right amount of abstractions: stacks with services that use networks and can have some storage in the form of volumes or bind mounts. Configuration in the form of environment variables and/or mounted files (or secrets), some deployment constraints and dependencies sometimes, some health checks and restart policies, as well as resource limits.

If I need a mail server, then I just have a container that binds to the ports (even low port numbers) that I need and configure it. If I need a web server, then I can just run Apache/Nginx/Caddy and use more or less 1:1 configuration files that I'd use when setting up either outside of containers, but with the added benefit of being able to refer to other apps by their service names (or aliases, if they have underscores in the names, which sometimes isn't liked).

At a certain scale, it's dead simple to use - no need for PVs and PVCs, no need for Ingress and Service abstractions, or lots and lots of templating that Helm charts would have (although those are nice in other ways).