Cockpit, a web-based server management interface

Cockpit, a web-based server management interface(liquidat.wordpress.com)

72 points by dzderic 12 years ago | 11 comments

antoncohen 12 years ago |

Mind blown. I thought this was some ordinary Python or Ruby app. It reminded me of Ajenti (http://ajenti.org/), which is nice admin panel.

But Cockpit is insane (not in a bad way).

    [starting cockpit] will cause systemd to listen on port 21064
    and start cockpit-ws when someone connects to it.
    Cockpit-ws will in turn activate cockpitd via D-Bus when
    someone logs in successfully.

Cockpit is written in C, by Red Hat. The web frontend has dbus.js that does D-Bus over WebSockets to communicate to the backend. I expect this project will evolve into something much bigger.

https://github.com/cockpit-project/cockpit

616c 12 years ago | |

And I have to be honest: even as someone who likes systemd, the maintenance and security implications of this concern me.

I was looking at the code and was surprised to find only Javascript and C, but your quick summary on the implementation makes me want to watch from the sidelines, cautiously.

That said, very interesting project AFAICT.

nodesocket 12 years ago |

Founder of https://commando.io here. Cockpit looks nice, but we take a little different approach. We are a web-based interface to manage servers via SSH. You write "recipes" which are simply scripts in shell, bash, perl, python, ruby, go, or node.js and choose a server or group of servers to execute recipes on. The complete output (stdout and stderr) is then stored and logged providing a nice audit trail of who executed what, when, where, and why. We are currently in free open beta.

bowlofpetunias 12 years ago | |

That sounds more interesting.

I'm not looking for a a monolithic solution, but something in which I can integrate all of our current scripts, third party tools, semi-manual processes and what have you.

In the real world, server management is a mix of tons of little tools and procedures, usually run over SSH.

However, handing SSH access to our systems to a third party SaaS tools scares the crap out of me.

danielbln 12 years ago | | |

> However, handing SSH access to our systems to a third party SaaS tools scares the crap out of me.

You're not alone. It's one of the reasons I'm a bit sad that open-source development of commando.io ceased in favour of their SaaS version.

fennecfoxen 12 years ago |

Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?

(Sorry. I understand if you mod me down for this. :P)

robbiet480 12 years ago | |

Joey, have you ever been in a... in a Turkish prison?

samstave 12 years ago | |

Ever seen a grown man naked?

msantos 12 years ago |

Be aware that

> Cockpit is under heavy development and it's advised you only run it in a virtual machine for now.

Another interesting Red Hat backed project in the same field of server management and deployment is The Foreman http://theforeman.org/manuals/1.4/index.html

spo81rty 12 years ago |

I work for a company called Stackify and we have some similar features for remote management and access. Along with server monitoring and much more. If anyone is looking for this type of functionality in a commercial product check us out. http://Stackify.com

glasz 12 years ago |

i just fell in love. looks so neat.

[starting cockpit] will cause systemd to listen on port 21064 and start cockpit-ws when someone connects to it. Cockpit-ws will in turn activate cockpitd via D-Bus when someone logs in successfully.