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Ask HN: A server admin panel that “just works?”

by serverQuestion on 12/8/18, 12:00 PM with 43 comments

• by syntheticcdo on 12/8/18, 10:46 PM

  If you want to set up your own server, why do you need a control panel? Just learn to configure all the services. Command line is all you need.

  If you want ease-of-use, running your own server is not the way to go. You can get pretty far with AWS/GCP/Azure free tier.

• by 64738 on 12/9/18, 2:25 AM

  I can whole-heartedly recommend Dokku[0], it's been fantastic for me, and does exactly what you describe.

  Edit: Doh! Except for the admin panel, which was a pretty major part of your question :) Dokku is CLI-based, though I seem to remember there being a third-party web ui for it, can't remember. Either way, it might still be worth checking out.

  [0] https://github.com/dokku/dokku

• by jchw on 12/8/18, 10:44 PM

  If you really want something like Heroku, you could try Dokku, though that's not really a control panel. Digital Ocean provides a droplet image for it.

• by lykr0n on 12/9/18, 12:45 AM

  Cockpit does a lot of the basic functionality you need.

• by jimsmart on 12/10/18, 10:47 PM

  Another option I don't see mentioned so far:

  We use VirtualMin on our servers for all of our commodity hosting (it is based upon WebMin). There is an open source version and a pro version. We use the pro version — I don't personally know what the exact differences are, as it was my colleague's choice historically, so I can't comment specifically on the open source version's features. But we've found it pretty good, and cheap enough ($6/month/server).

  It takes literally seconds to set up a new domain, provides config info to copy across to our DNS provider (we don't do DNS on the same machine, other folk can provide a far more reliable service at no extra cost: FWIW, we use Joker), it has support for autocerts from Let's Encrypt, and has fairly up-to-date app bundles for a lot of well known web apps.

  I'm a developer, and have no issues with command line, but using a control panel for day-to-day basics is just so easy, pretty much a total no-brainer, and also allows us to have more technically minded folk manage their own domains/subdomains and services (if you wish to share/resell).

  I've used Plesk before, and didn't like it much, for a variety of reasons (including when it borked an update, and was all kinds of hell to fix)

  https://www.virtualmin.com

• by devxpy on 12/8/18, 11:57 PM

  I've been using captainduckduck in production for a while now.

  It might be a little finniky for you to wrap your head around at first, but it does work well once you do that.

  https://captainduckduck.com

• by kiwijamo on 12/9/18, 1:08 AM

  I’ve started using Ansible to document how I want my server set up in a machine readable way. Very useful because when I want to start over I can just run my Ansible playbooks to set up everything to how I want it. I’d prefer that to an GUI approach such as an admin panel. A GUI makes it difficult to record your desired configuration and then later initialise a new server (or a reinstalled OS) to use said configuration. Even simply writing a shell script to do the configuration would be great as it means you’re both (1) documenting your configuration preferences and (2) making a tool that sets everything up as per your preferences. YMMV of course.

• by reacharavindh on 12/9/18, 11:14 AM

  I think this is the usecase Redhat is trying to target with its Cockpit application. Easy GUI admin for a server. I think it works with all Linux distros but more tuned for Refora, RHEL, CentOS.

• by thekonqueror on 12/10/18, 2:30 AM

  I built ScaleDynamix[1] with similar goals in mind. It connects to your AWS/GCP/Azure account via terraform and gives you a cpanel like interface to launch sites. You can also horizontally scale the stack either manually or automatically based on utilization. It's optimized for php, but you can run any other languages easily on it.

  There is a free version available for non-commercial projects.

  [1] https://scaledynamix.com

• by woudsma on 12/8/18, 10:50 PM

  I’m using Dokku + Kirby or Serverpilot + Kirby. Kirby has a plugin called autogit, where you can update/save changes to/from a git repository

• by vgeek on 12/9/18, 1:52 AM

  If you want LAMP/LEMP, check out https://vestacp.com/.

  You can provision a subdomain and clone whatever repo into the root directory and be functional pretty quickly.

• by bfoks on 12/8/18, 11:41 PM

  Take a look at this discussion: https://twitter.com/wesbos/status/1067833058731147265

• by keviv on 12/11/18, 12:50 PM

  For PHP projects, Laravel Forge is a good option https://forge.laravel.com/

• by unixhero on 12/8/18, 10:59 PM

  Webmin

  Cloudron

• by leetbulb on 12/8/18, 11:30 PM

  We have a Plesk server that we use to host random stuff easily. Takes care of DNS, Git, updates, etc etc. Great solution for something that just works.

• by InGodsName on 12/9/18, 5:41 PM

  ServerPilot.io is nice for php/wordpress lately they turned themsleves into a paid only solution.

• by kyriakos on 12/9/18, 5:03 AM

  Cpanel still works fine assuming you are looking to run LAMP. Takes care of everything for you.

• by daemonk on 12/9/18, 1:51 AM

  Get a dedicated root server with hetzner. It's relatively cheap for what you get.

• by leowoo91 on 12/9/18, 6:02 PM

  Can IaaS be considered as the new admin panel?

• by xaduha on 12/8/18, 11:30 PM

  After I started using Nixos I can't imagine using anything else. https://nixos.org

• by alixaxel on 12/9/18, 7:15 AM

  Flynn.io does this to some extent.

• by pmlnr on 12/9/18, 2:51 AM

  Webmin, yunohost, freedombox

• by spicyusername on 12/9/18, 3:25 PM

  Cockpit meets these needs.

• by alexandernst on 12/9/18, 12:00 AM

  Plesk

• by slifin on 12/9/18, 3:57 PM

  Proxmox