Some time ago I was explaining how to set up Portainer on a new server. By then I already moved away from Caprover, a system that was too much abstract to have control over the architecture of your devops. So Portainer let me use docker compose files (sort of) to build and deploy my apps and I switched to it.
What happened then?
I realised that Portainer was abstracting still too much. I wouldn't have an easy access to the compose files in case something went wrong (and it did). And on the other hand it added too much complexity with lots of configuration and networking options.
Until I found a simpler, cleaner and more transparent way to handle my docker apps.
Meet Dockge
Dockge is a "easy-to-use and reactive self-hosted docker compose.yaml stack-oriented manager". In other words is a UI to let you manage your docker apps but in the background is just docker compose files in your folders. You don't need to run commands to start a stack, or to stop it or to update it or to read logs. Everything is on the clean UI and refreshes in real time. But if you need to use the CLI, or to edit the compose files directly, you still can.
I'm glad I found Dockge through the Github Trending account on Bluesky. That will be my go to way from now on.