This Docker Compose UI is amazing! //Dockge Tutorial

In this video, I'll be introducing you to Dockge, a free and open-source web UI for managing Docker Compose projects in your Homelab. Developed by the creators of UptimeKuma, Dockge offers a user-friendly interface for deploying new projects, managing existing ones, and troubleshooting with easy access to container shells and logs. Stay tuned to see just how simple and efficient this tool can make your Docker experience.
References:
- Dockge GitHub: github.com/louislam/dockge
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Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:34 How to install Dockge?
03:49 Basic Features to manage Compose Projects
07:44 Let’s create a simple web stack in Dockge
12:01 Final thoughts
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[@PrymalInstynct]

As of 1.4.0 Dockge supports adding additional agents to an instance. So you can control all your compose projects across servers from a single Dockge instance.

[@cybr774]

Awesome, I wasn't following closely the project, this is one of the features I was looking for. Now it's only missing GitOps functionality. If that's ever added, for me Portainer will officially be dead for managing docker🎉

[@PrymalInstynct]

@@cybr774 Out of curiosity what GitOps functionality are you looking for?

[@atomicpapa]

Thanks for the update on that! I wasn't aware of that change.

[@hafizhfadhlurrohman1760]

love to hear that

[@christianlempa]

Awesome! This is great news, thanks for sharing

[@DeliberateGeek]

I recently fell down the Home Lab rabbit hole, which is by itself a detour from the Home Automation rabbit hole. As a result, I came across your channel. I had only just gotten Portainer going with a couple of stacks when I found this video. I installed Dockge to try it out and completely moved my config over to it immediately. Thanks for this vide and for what looks like a great channel overall!

[@christianlempa]

Awesome story! Thank you so much for being here :)

[@PRS9091]

I deinstalled Portainer after using Dockge for about 30 minutes (and I haven't missed it). Highly recommended!

[@christianlempa]

lol :D

[@goodcitizen4587]

Dockge doesn't show a summary ports used by the containers. If you have 30 containers, Portainer shows their ports in a single list.

[@try-that]

Probably the best video so far showing how to use dockge. Nicely done.

[@christianlempa]

Thank you :)

[@mikrom]

I love uptime Kuma and this looks amazing! Exactly the right level of simplicity for small home lab without any hardcore crap! Thanks

[@christianlempa]

Awesome!

[@mikrom]

All migrated and running on Dockge now. 👍 I love Update button. 👍 Build command in compose seems to work (unlike in Portainer) 🙏 It would be nice to include some basic volume/image/network management, at least Prune button 😏 🤔 For some reason my changedetection was not able to communicate with chrome-browser within the same stack until I manually added them to the same internal network (that was not needed with Portainer) But overall I am quite happy.

[@NOBODY-oq1xr]

this tool comes at the perfect time for a new homelabber like me! thanks for showing it!

[@christianlempa]

Awesome!

[@launebaer86]

Nice, this looks like exactly what I need as I wanted to switch from a portainer + docker run command list to docker compose. Perfect timing! :)

[@AcidCows]

you can have compose projects in portainer.

[@christianlempa]

Awesome :D

[@Therysin]

Do stacks not exist for you in portainer?

[@enzolorenzo2589]

There is a life beyond Portainer.

[@christianlempa]

:D

[@milicsantiago]

Great video, Christian! Greetings from Argentina!

[@christianlempa]

thanks :)

[@Vaidd4]

Wow I was searching for a simpler/lighter alternative to portainer for a long time, almost decided to make on myself (but would never be as good as this)

[@GundamExia88]

I love Dockge. I switched to Dockge and it runs nicely. Been using for couple months.

[@christianlempa]

Awesome!

[@KewlkatNDahat]

I just heard about this yesterday...it has sped up my docker container creation and managing. Been doing mostly docker compose for everything but when troubleshooting, this is faster for me. Plus I'm only 1month into this whole docker homelab thing.

[@christianlempa]

awesome!

[@NazarMalyy]

This is a tasteful piece of software! It will save me a lot of time... and it is colorful!!!

[@prashlovessamosa]

Hey Christian please make video on your terminal setup again last one is 2 years ago lot of stuff is changed.

[@Jimmy_Jones]

Well, until Warp is available on anything other than MacOS, it's useless to me. Hopefully they will release a Linux version soon.

[@prashlovessamosa]

Are you talking about that rusty terminal yeah I am also waiting for that​@@Jimmy_Jones

[@Glatze603]

@@Jimmy_Jones then take a look at wave terminal 👍

[@christianlempa]

It's already planned! Somewhere in Feb, there will be an update video to this :)

[@atomicpapa]

I recently found Dockge and have really enjoyed it. great lil app!

[@christianlempa]

Nice

[@danieldewindt3919]

Thanks for sharing i will give it a try today!

[@christianlempa]

Hope you enjoy

[@DavidJones-pi8rl]

Great video and I'll certainly be trying it out!

[@christianlempa]

Awesome! Tell us how it works

[@fullgazz]

Rarely use anything beside CLI but portainer still looks better. Thanks for the vid.

[@christianlempa]

Thanks for watching!

[@varunaeeriyaulla]

Louis Lam knows how to design nice UIs.

[@christianlempa]

true :D

[@MrAsdf1980]

I am using Dockge on my Home server for a while and it’s almost perfect

[@christianlempa]

Awesome :D

[@romayojr]

i just started getting comfortable with using cli 😁but i'm also still using portiner, i'll definitely give dockge a try later down the road

[@christianlempa]

Awesome to hear!

[@jonathanchevallier7046]

Thank you for this discovery. It's a nice way to learn docker compose strcture too. Very nice. ;-)

[@christianlempa]

Glad you like it!

[@fredrik354]

This looks like a good replacement for Portainer for me. I'm about to go back to just keeping my Swarm in files because Portainer, even if great, is just too much fluff since I only use it to have a quick view from time to time. I was looking into one solution which was terminal based however this does look nice.. uptime-kuma dev has great taste. Thank you for a great video as always, Christian!

[@christianlempa]

Yep, 100% agree! :)

[@brunekxxx91]

There is one thing missing from it tho. And that is docker image managment EDIT: My current setup is yacht (replacement to portainer) with dockge. Highly recommend!

[@kleztv1542]

@@brunekxxx91I really cant see the advantage of writing templates... Then i can write a compose.yml directly.

[@Jan12700]

For everyone that has already Running Compose Stacks or want to switch from Portainer to it and every Compose Stack is grayed out and says "This stack is not managed by Dockge.", there is a simple solution for it. For me it worked that I manually created a new stack (+compose) with the same name as Dockge shows it and paste the Docker-Compose file in it and save it. After I had done this with a Stack I could Control it.

[@christianlempa]

That's a bit weird, make sure you followed the stacks settings correctly.

[@nicoladellino8124]

Very nice video and project, THX.

[@christianlempa]

thank you so much :)

[@mysticsilent]

Yes it is wonderful! Use it for some weeks now. 🎉

[@christianlempa]

Wonderful!

[@esra_erimez]

Happy and Healthy New Year to Christian and all the Christian Lempa viewers! Who's watching in 2024? I never clicked a video so fast. This is very interesting and informative.

[@christianlempa]

Happy new year :)

[@IanCliveKerrCoelho]

Incredible!!!! I like it!

[@christianlempa]

Thank you :)

[@ricardocosta9336]

I was looking for this exactly

[@christianlempa]

Nice :)

[@beprivatecdblind7831]

looks good definitely give it a go

[@christianlempa]

Have fun!

[@JohnWeland]

I love that it now has an agent model for running multiple instances. I am wondering if one of those agents was deployed on a Docker Swarm manager, if then you could deploy stacks on docker swarm. (I haven't tried that yet)

[@christianlempa]

Awesome, don't know tbh, but I'll try it out

[@aelidrissi3584]

A good video!!! Thank you 🙏🏻

[@christianlempa]

Thank you so much :)

[@Lunolux]

thx for the video, 2 months that i use dockge, i like it, i dont think i will be back to portainer, portainer has too much functionnality for my use

[@ukrolelo]

Thank you! This is exactly what i need🎉 i dont like portainer,too much stuff for beginner

[@christianlempa]

Awesome, glad you like it!

[@repairstudio4940]

Like Portainer? I love the update being a one click button in the UI and the env. vars are great as well! 🎉

[@Pendrgn]

Seems just like it.

[@repairstudio4940]

@@Pendrgn it'd be great to see a video comparing the two. I'm a creature of habit and always need a excuse before trying something new. If there's no real benefit from switching to something new I generally won't. Some these features do seem nice and even the UI looks nice. I'll slap it on my "maybe" list... Lol.

[@electric-m]

Surely u cabbies stacks in Portainer. What looks great to me in Dockge is that you can build the Yaml through the guide in guided way.

[@Jonteponte71]

On big missing feature in Portainer is that you don't get to see the cli output from docker/docker-compose. Which means that when something goes wrong it will just dump an error notification without any context. This will show everything. And also, it's very clear where the docker-compose yaml files are for dockge. They are all in the same place and accessible via the filesystem.

[@repairstudio4940]

@@Jonteponte71 this is looking much better than Portainer, even though I've held tight to it for some time now... It may be time to let go and embrace Dockge. :-)

[@ninji4182]

can this help with mapping drives to a docker container? let's say I have docker running on one pc and I want to access a folder from my nas?

[@muhammadumarsotvoldiev8768]

Thank you very much!

[@christianlempa]

You're welcome!

[@uuu12343]

For once, I can say that I've been using a software before the Home Lab tubers have talked about it Finally

[@christianlempa]

You should become my video researching source :D

[@timderks5960]

Quick semi-relevant question about sensitive information and the .env file: What makes storing that in the .env file safer? I could see the benefit for a streamer/KZbinr who does a tutorial in their compose file, so it's not there right on the screen, but if you're using Dockge for your tutorial that benefit already disappears. Is there really a good reason to store sensitive info in the .env file?

[@christianlempa]

It's better to store the secrets outside the compose files because I'm storing them on Git, etc. The .env file is not the most ideal, but the best I have right now

[@patrickjoseph3412]

Dare i say i like editing my compose with NANO

[@christianlempa]

Well, do what fits best your style :)

[@blender_wiki]

What's more important is that Dockge supports Podman that means he can be a solution also in production environment end not just in a lab.

[@christianlempa]

Good point!

[@electric-m]

Damn, that’s nice!

[@christianlempa]

Yes it is :D

[@Glatze603]

Hi Christian, dockge creates projects with root privileges (see at 11:37), so if you use a folder structure in your home directory, dockge managed projects are no more accessable with your user.

[@christianlempa]

Thanks!

[@XCanG]

I kinda don't understand why you would you store docker-compose.yml files in one folder?! In my case if I have project, I using git and as I using git I also add compose file here, so that when I deploy with CI/CD I also deploy with docker and I just run that compose file from CI/CD. In cases where I didn't do CI/CD, I still git clone repository with all files including compose and I just run it from here. It also make it easy to run file and check logs since there is only one docker-compose file in active folder (otherwise you would need to pass config argument with file name)... So, it only confusing.

[@jig1056]

This seems very cool I’m definitely gonna check it out, I don’t know if I’m going to abandon portainer but I can see this being very helpful. I personally like to keep /edit my docker-compose.yml files on my computer and ssh them to my docker host. This way I can easily try it out on my test box once I’ve perfected it, then deploy it to my production box. I’m willing to give this a try though. Thanks for sharing. Also, what terminal are you using?

[@christianlempa]

Awesome! I'm using Warp Terminal :)

[@EricOnYouTube]

Dang, my Ubuntu server installation wont connect to the internet. :(.

[@raymondhughes2269]

What terminal are you using? I love how it’s staying at the top and scrolls down

[@christianlempa]

Warp Terminal, made a video about it :)

[@guglielmobrasile6632]

I'm not sure if I've correctly understood. Is possible to share volomes among containers? If I have a folder with photo, is it possible to share it beetween 2 containers?

[@christianlempa]

Yep it is ;)

[@ronm6585]

Thank you.

[@christianlempa]

You're welcome :)

[@RamiKattan]

Wow, this is a great new discovery: I have been using portainer on my homelab mini server since more than 3 years, and I have many containers running my home services, and backing up the stacks was a burden on me: every few months I used to manually go and copy the stack yml from portainer and save it in yml files on my PC for backup. This Dockage is something that will turn my containers upside down ;) This is a first step in the "Infrastructure as Code" transformation

[@christianlempa]

Awesome

[@Draenal]

I'll keep tabs on it. I manage everything I possibly can in compose files because it's easy to maintain and deploy, but there are some notable misses here such as support for secrets (I'm assuming. I didn't see it anywhere on the UI).

[@Dwykid1]

Well it's just docker compose under the hood. The GUI doesn't recognize it but if you currently run secrets and have the compose files set accordingly, it'll work.

[@christianlempa]

Secret management shouldn't be handled by the web UI, in my opinion. It's a function that should be implemented by docker or podman

[@New9-dq3tk]

now I am curious can we run portainer and dockage on a single system !!

[@christianlempa]

There's no reason why you couldn't

[@New9-dq3tk]

thats what i was thinking that would give us a decent best of both worlds ! @@christianlempa

[@user-ju3sl1yx9e]

Tell me how you use GPT chat for practical purposes, both paid and free?

[@wstrater]

I am running Docker on an OS that doesn’t have a docker-compose install. Does it have its own docker-compose or do I need to install it on the host OS? Any tool that allows me to own my configuration is a major win over Poratainer.

[@christianlempa]

Compose is now part of the Docker CLI, the old docker-compose package is deprecated.

[@Trashpanda_404]

Dude I’m so flipping lost! Installed perfectly, can login and see everything, but once I create the stack and container for Flowise it continues to give me errors. I’m following everything to a T, but there isn’t enough documentation on Dockge for even GPT4 to help.

[@user-zg6sh4vu6y]

Does it support docker swarm?

[@MichaelHumbles]

As a noob, Portainer is helpful when i am creating a stack because it points out errors in my syntax, does Dockge do the same?

[@MichaelHumbles]

Been using Dockge now about a month. it does do this and has been very easy to use and manage stacks

[@emil.steiner]

the backend network should have probably been an internal network right?

[@christianlempa]

?

[@Boburto]

Is there a button to update all running containers? I really hate that you have to use so many steps in portainer (I don’t want to use watchtower). Although a bit concerning that “delete” deletes all files that are mapped into the container, this doesn’t sound correct.

[@christianlempa]

Maybe they'll add it

[@amirtaherkhani]

How can run the dockge behind traefik 2.11 ?

[@christianlempa]

Check out my traefik video if you need some tutorials

[@jpSimkins]

Can't seem to get this to work. Every folder/file it creates is owned by root:root and makes it more of a pain to use than not. It's been a while and I remember this being an issue before but cannot recall right now how to resolve it. Either way, would love to get this working but seems more work than what my current workflow is. Still, good find and nice video.

[@christianlempa]

Thanks! I found it to be more useful to create projects only in dockge when I'm managing them in dockge solely, and for anything else I will create the project as my user and only use dockge for troubleshooting, stopping, restarting, visibility, etc.

[@jakobholzner]

what kind of CLI is this?

[@christianlempa]

Warp

[@Voigt_Analytics]

Wenn Du mir zeigen kannst, wie ich Discourse (das Forensystem) mittels Dockge oder auch Portainer bauen und verwalten kann, dann gerne. Geht aber m.W.n. nicht, da die Entwickler ein total blödes Setup gebaut haben, was im Prinzip die Nutzer dazu zwingt eine einzige Instanz standardmäßig auf einen Server laufen zu lassen. Ich möchte Serverressourcen sinnvoller nutzen, weshalb ich mir immerhin schon die Mühe gemacht habe, auf einen Server zwei Discourse Instanzen laufen zu lassen. Das Forensystem ist einfach genial und die eierlegende Wollmichsau unter den Open Source Projekten. Doch die Verwaltung und das deployen neuer Instanzen ist ein Graus.

[@DarioEspina]

So this is Portainer but OpenSource

[@christianlempa]

Portainer is open source too :D but anyway, it's a great tool agreed :)

[@MolehillTech]

Wear your sunglasses at 4:49 😎

[@christianlempa]

:D

[@hammerschaedel]

can it update itself?

[@christianlempa]

I don't think it does, haven't tried it out yet though

[@chrisconnell2763]

Big thanks. I think this is what I was searching for since portainer was too overloaded for my requirements. I'm wondering if this projects name is pronounced 'dockedge' or like you did it it 'dock Gee Eee'. Anyone here who knows this?

[@christianlempa]

Haha, no idea how to pronounce it, and I bet I've done it all wrong :D

[@uxhdwgfqak]

What terminal is this?

[@christianlempa]

Warp Terminal

[@RocketLR]

Does it support Swarms? :O

[@christianlempa]

no idea

[@kkoppa]

If Dockge allows to sync my stacks using Git, I WILL replace Portainer.

[@christianlempa]

that would be amazing

[@basdfgwe]

Whats wrong with portainer... ?

[@FunctionGermany]

"Incorrect order of source and target of mounts Inconsistent case-sensitivity No automatically created custom networks for inter-container communication Inconsistent compose implementations on different architectures Pulls every tag on update when you don't set a specific tag Capabilities are hidden and some don't work at all on ARM platforms"

[@christianlempa]

Well, there's nothing "wrong" with Portainer, it's some another tool that is also great :)

[@Gnanmankoudji]

It would be great to integrate it into portainer

[@christianlempa]

why?

[@Gnanmankoudji]

@@christianlempa I don't really need it, but I think it would be a great addition to portainer, making it even easier to manage variables in compose files and so on.

[@diabeticnomad]

Seems like he is trying to recreate portainer which is fine and great if he is keeping 100% foss. Something the portainer devs did not do.

[@Glatze603]

Hi Christian + thanks for your Video. This seems a nice web based manamegemt UI for many docker compose projects on one or many docker hosts, but I see all my containers "grayed out" and when I click on one I get the message "This stack is not managed by Dockge."... To Container-log shows this errors: 2024-01-09T18:07:29+01:00 [GETSERVICESTATUSLIST] ERROR: Error: spawn docker ENOENT at __node_internal_captureLargerStackTrace (node:internal/errors:496:5) at __node_internal_errnoException (node:internal/errors:623:12) at ChildProcess._handle.onexit (node:internal/child_process:283:19) at onErrorNT (node:internal/child_process:476:16) at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:82:21)

[@Jan12700]

Had the same issue. For me it worked that I manually created a new stack (+compose) with the same name as Dockge shows it and paste the Docker-Compose file in it and save it. After I had done this with a Stack I could Control it.

[@Glatze603]

@@Jan12700 Thanks, this is not the way how it is described on github, but it works 🙂

[@christianlempa]

This is weird, never had this issue before, but maybe you could raise an issue on GitHub and find out what's going wrong.

[@Glatze603]

@@Jan12700 Hi, that´s not the way how it is described on github, but it worked on my test docker host (with 15 container). Bevor I use it on my prod docker (> 40 container) I wait till the next release and a result to my issue on github.

[@abc321meins]

cd portainer docker compose down

[@christianlempa]

lol

[@chyldstudios]

Dockge ... is just missing some vowels in its name.

[@blackvas]

why not a portainer?

[@ObjectiveTruthSeeker]

Portainer is more featureful but there is too much clicking around for simple things. I end up opening several tabs for a single stack to edit, see the logs, and use the terminal. You also can’t see what Portainer is doing when you’re starting a new stack and it’s pulling images for example. It just “spins” and eventually either works or spits out a temporary notification pop up which the whole error doesn’t always fit it. Dockge lets you do most of that in a single screen without jumping around.

[@christianlempa]

why not docker cli? :D

[@TonyKirkland]

Who do I need to bribe to get warp term on linux? :)

[@christianlempa]

Some day it will happen :D

[@thegrumpydeveloper]

TIL the file compose.yml is preferred over docker-compose in 2024

[@christianlempa]

Yep, good one!

[@HotBotShot]

first?

[@repairstudio4940]

Indeed, first. Here you are 🏆.

[@christianlempa]

:D

[@illegalsmirf]

It seems that managing containers is almost as complex as managing servers, and I thought containers were created to be simpler and easier to manage?

[@Jonteponte71]

They are still much easier than having to deal with actually installing all the applications on the same server verbatim. I am running 22 containers on my NAS. That would be a nightmare to manage on bare metal.

[@blender_wiki]

Managing containers is very easy you just must know what you do, that why most people don't even need a UI to manage containers

[@christianlempa]

Containers aren't created to make technology easier for consumers, but to make developer workflows and deployment processes easier. As always in IT, you still need to know what you're doing, and why you're doing it this way. Enjoy the learning process! It's so much fun :D

[@illegalsmirf]

@@christianlempa Yes they are designed for developers who know nothing about servers (or who want to know nothing about servers). For ad hoc development they are indeed easier than setting up a server. But for any devop or admin tasked to administer production containers, the level of complexity is insane to the point where with Kubernetes clustering and monitoring it's indistinguishable from the expense and complexity of server admin. I see a lot of people using containers as replacements for servers or other purposes in an appropriate way e.g. having 22 instances of an application instead of one instance with 22 users.

[@RaduRadonys]

@@illegalsmirf "I see a lot of people using containers as replacements for servers" I mean I have 50 containers on a single VM on a single mini-server... What would be the alternative you suggest, having 50 VMs? Or even better, having 50 physical servers??? I guess you can see why we use containers...

[@romeozor]

That's a terrible name for a project.

[@christianlempa]

haha true :D

[@lnk77]

bla, bla, bla, WTF ? What system do you use ?? Windows, Unix, Linux,, OS ? or Free DOS ?

[@greendsnow]

it's a security risk. somebody can brute force into your entire docker system by trying your password....

[@christianlempa]

???