Let's be honest. Web-based VPS control panels are great—until you check your server resource logs and see they're consuming 15% of your RAM, or you realize your root SSH private key is sitting in a MySQL database on the web.
I wanted a dashboard to manage my Docker containers and Nginx configs, but without the security risk or the resource bloat.
So, I built one. Here's why I chose a local-first approach using Tauri and Rust.
Vessel is fully open-source (MIT) and free to use. You can download the pre-built binaries or check out the code: https://github.com/shihebamrii/vessel
I have a question for you: If you could add one feature to a local-first VPS control panel to make it replace your current command-line workflow, what would it be? Let's discuss in the comments!
Top comments (2)
If I'm picking one feature: live log tailing for every container in one pane, with search across them. That's the single thing that keeps pulling me back to the terminal, and a desktop app is actually in a good spot to do it well, since it can hold persistent connections without a browser tab falling asleep in the background.
That's a really good one. I hadn't thought about cross-container search, but I agree that's one of the biggest reasons I still end up back in the terminal.