Last Updated on 3 weeks by Sachin G

The cockpit is a web console, an interactive management utility that can be able to manage local as well as remote server administration. It offers system statistics of the current time, we can troubleshoot all tasks, that we were doing manually like Configuring SELinux, running commands from the terminal session, tuning system performance, etc. In this topic, we will discuss installing on Ubuntu and rpm-based Linux distributions.

This utility uses a management tool. We can manage system services, virtual machines, containers, storage devices, and user management.

Supported Operating System :

Cockpit package support multiple operating system , some of names are below listed.

(1) Fedora CoreOS (3) Red Hat ( RHEL ) (4) Atomic (5) CentOS Stream (6) Debian (7) Ubuntu (8) Clear Linux (9) ArchLinux (9) Alma Linux (10) SUSE Linux

Steps to Install Cockpit Utility

Here i am adding both commands for RPM and Debian-based Operating systems. CentOs have their own repository for package installation, so we will use the default provided a repository for this utility to install.

Steps to Install Cockpit on Ubuntu 24.04

Before installing Cockpit, it’s important to ensure your system is up-to-date. Run the following commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y

Cockpit is available in the default Ubuntu repositories starting with Ubuntu latest version . To install it, simply run:

sudo apt install cockpit -y

Installing Cockpit on Other Linux Distributions

CentOS/RHEL Fedora and AlmaLinux/Rocky Linux

Here we are going to search cockpit utility in the repository. This search command also showing utility other module and plugins, you can add more plugin or module , as you want to manage.

For CentOS/RHEL and AlmaLinux/Rocky Linux , may be you needed the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository

sudo dnf search cockpit

Below are command to install utility , Generally Cockpit is already installed on the latest CentOs OS , but it is not active and Enabled for the boot time .

sudo dnf install cockpit -y

Enable and Start the Cockpit Service

Once installed, enable and start the Cockpit service using the following commands:

systemctl enable cockpit.socket
systemctl start cockpit 

Verify Cockpit Installation

To ensure that Cockpit is running, check its status:

sudo systemctl status cockpit.socket

Add the service of cockpit to open web console from outside our network.

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=cockpit
firewall-cmd --reload

Now you can open the web console of utility through browser , Use your the machine IP or hostname to access the web console.

https://host_or_ip:9090

Accept the self-signed certificate by adding it as an exception.

Cockpit Web Console

BASIC ADMINISTRATION TASK

We can do basic server administration task like reboot , shutdown , log, network configuration , performance and monitoring and hardware information etc through web console.