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Cockpit

cockpit.jpeg

Introduction

Cockpit is a free and opensource web-based graphical server management tool that allows administrators and Linux users to easily manage and configure their Linux servers/PCs from a browser.

Cockpit is easy to install and simple to use. At a glance, it allows you to perform the following tasks.     

  • Keep tabs of system metrics and performance    
  • Create and manage users   
  • Browse and search system logs    
  • Inspect and interact with systemd-based services    
  • Access the terminal and run commands    
  • Inspect system’s hardware    
  • Create and manage virtual machines    
  • Upgrade software packages to their latest versions    
  • Configure Firewall & and many more.

Cockpit Installation

Update Local Package Index 

To start off, log into your server and refresh the local package index as follows.

sudo apt update

Install Cockpit Web Console 

The Cockpit web console packages are provided by the official Ubuntu repositories. You can verify this by running the following command.

apt search cockpit

So, install Cockpit using the APT package manager as shown. 

sudo apt install cockpit -y

The command installs the Cockpit web console alongside other additional packages, libraries, and dependencies.

Verify Installation

Once installed, you can verify if cockpit is installed by running the following command: 

apt -qq list cockpit OR $ dpkg -l cockpit

Optional Packages

If you plan to manage KVM virtual machines with cockpit then install following package:

sudo apt install cockpit-machines -y

By default, Cockpit does not provide support for podman. If you wish to administer and manage podman containers using Cockpit, install the cockpit-podman package which provides support for podman. 

sudo apt install cockpit-podman y

Starting Cockpit Web Console Service 

Unlike other services or daemons, Cockpit does not start automatically once installed. Therefore, start the Cockpit systemd service as shown. 

sudo systemctl start cockpit

Verify that the Cockpit service is running as follows. 

sudo systemctl status cockpit

Cockpit listens on TCP port 9090. You can verify this is the case by running the following ss command.

ss -tunlpe | grep cockpit

 

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