I sometimes end up breaking my container setups because I get confused with all the layers and config settings (and I don't even have all that many containers), so I began to investigate management alternatives.
Of course, I'm still leveraging a locally managed Linux system (Ubuntu) to run my containers. I've not tried to install containers on Mac hosts and I'm not even going to try with Windows. From what I understand, I've to use a VM to run Linux on a Mac host, or use Docker Desktop. I'd rather just use native Linux since I'm a Linux power user...anything else appears to drastically add complications, plus it's kind of stupid to install Linux on a VM when I've a bunch of Linux hosts that I can immediately leverage.
I decided to try Portainer after watching some usage videos. It was super-simple to get it running (it's containerized) and it was super easy to shut down my existing containers and run them on Portainer - I just copied each compose.yml into Portainer to set them up as containers. While I could see the pre-Portainer container (before I'd shut them down), they were only partially manageable with Portainer. Building them under Portainer gave me full control.
As well, I found where Portainer keeps it's underlying files so that I could leverage them (if need be). I also keep copies of my compose.yml files (I do not use Git or GitHub for my files - yet).
I'm currently using five containers (three for Wordpress, one for Pi-hole, and one for Portainer), which allows me to use Portainer's community license setup, but I've also found that I can manage the currently running containers (all five) from Portainer, without licensing agents.
Portainer is something I'm going to be using as much as possible. I haven't even tried the other solutions but Portainer give me the most power; I don't even need to experiment with the other solutions.
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