Portainer & Yacht have been around for quite some time, but both can be a bit complex for newer users to self-hosting. Recently I came across a new manager called Dockge. This manager is still fairly new, at the time of writing this article, but is already proving to be a very useful app. Dockge was created by Louis Lam, who also created Uptime Kuma.

Key Features

Here’s some of the features listed on their official GitHub:

  • Manage compose.yaml
    • Create/Edit/Start/Stop/Restart/Delete
    • Update Docker Images
  • Interactive Editor for compose.yaml
  • Interactive Web Terminal
  • Reactive
    • Everything is just responsive. Progress (Pull/Up/Down) and terminal output are in real-time
  • Easy-to-use & fancy UI
    • If you love Uptime Kuma’s UI/UX, you will love this one too
  • Convert docker run ... commands into compose.yaml
  • File based structure
    • Dockge won’t kidnap your compose files, they are stored on your drive as usual. You can interact with them using normal docker compose commands

Now this app won’t do everything that Portainer does, but if you are like me you don’t need 90% of what Portainer offers anyway.

Installation

Installing Dockge is as easy as can be by following these directions taken from the GitHub page:

# Create a directory that stores your stacks and stores dockge's compose.yaml
mkdir -p /opt/stacks /opt/dockge
cd /opt/dockge

# Download the compose.yaml
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/louislam/dockge/master/compose.yaml --output compose.yaml

# Start the Server
docker compose up -d

# If you are using docker-compose V1 or Podman
# docker-compose up -d

(Default directory and port: /opt/stacks | 5001)

They even provide an interactive compose.yaml generator which can be found here.

Updating Dockge can be done with the following commands:

cd /opt/dockge
docker compose pull && docker compose up -d

Info

Visit the official website.