Dockge may replace Portainer for me

Portainer has been an extremely useful tool for managing my two docker hosts, and while I wasn't pushing to replace it, when I heard about an alternative container management tool from the Louis Lam, the guy behind Uptime Kuma, I knew I wanted to give it a try.

One thing I try and do is follow a standard. I create compose.yml files for every container and stack. I do this so I can easily move containers and configs between docker hosts. Portainer likes to put all your stack compose files inside portainer's data folder, so things get a little confusing for me having stacks managed by Portainer. I'd much rather have a directory per stack, and a compose.yml inside of that directory alongside all the bound directories for persistent storage related to that container.

So how does Dockge handle things? Pretty much exactly how I just described. It puts the compose.yml inside of a directory per-stack. It follows my container philisophy, which is huge! Love it.

Dockge has features that matter, like being able to start and stop stacks, restart individual containers, and see logs. You can also get into bash for the containers which is very nice (although there is no paste feature! It needs one bad!) You can also edit and create new compose.yml files on the fly, which is also awesome.

After my partial transition to Dockge, I'm not totally ready to ditch Portainer just yet- There's a couple features which are superior to Dockge. it's still better at reading logs for individual containers. Dockge gives you a combined feed of the log related to all containers in a stack, but that can get very messy very quickly. There's no way to filter the logs, and there's no way to look at the logs per-container. With that, it makes it less effective for debugging a container issue. Portainer is superior here, and I'd love to see further development in this department.

I'd also love to see some sort of multi-factor authentication via TOTP. I'm not exposing it to the internet since I can VPN into my network via wireguard, but I admit it'd be nice to have some security there.

Overall I'm a big fan of the solution and I'll be making the switch to dockge if I can. It seems like a powerful tool for managing all my docker compose files.