Comes and goes? Webmin would like a word

I have been using Webmin/Virtualmin for all of my 15-years as a web host. I love it, although it can be a little idiosyncratic in places, once you know how to operate with it, you won’t ever need anything else. It’s never been the most bleeding-edge or fully-featured, but it’s also never fallen behind with security and compatibility updates, and it’s had a surge in new development lately, which is exciting. On a Debian system, it’s always been rock solid for me.

Virtualmin in particular is more targeted towards production web servers, but I think they’re both something of a happy medium between a GUI and the terminal; The interfaces are all pretty explicit about the components you’re interfacing with, and nearly all of them include the ability to pop open the conf files to edit them directly.

The extensive UI isn’t the most flashy or polished, but it’s functional and if you get bored enough (as I did) you can theme the entire thing with a single CSS file (be prepared for a lot of ‘!important’ and other things that will drive UI/X folks nuts), and make it look rather stylish.

The only downside (and this isn’t really a downside for production servers) is it’s opinionated on how some things “should” be configured. It’s not restrictive, per se, but it’s not very tolerant for “coloring outside the lines”. You can run an Apache or Nginx reverse proxy, but if you want to use Caddy or Traefik or something similar, this may not be the admin panel for you.

Myself, I just run Webmin/Virtualmin on my production servers, and use a separate server for Docker and apps, where I’ve used both Cockpit and Portainer, but generally tend to stick with the CLI. The command line will always be the best, most efficient way of interfacing with Linux. Once I’d learned enough to be comfortable, I found it becomes increasingly preferable for most common tasks.