Unlock Easy Server Management on CentOS 8 with Cockpit: Step‑by‑Step Guide

Overview

Cockpit is a web‑based management console included in CentOS 8. It provides graphical interfaces for tasks such as user management, firewall configuration, storage, network monitoring, and container management.

YUM repository configuration for CentOS 8.5.2111

Default repositories may be unavailable. Replace them with the Alibaba Cloud mirror.

# Backup original BaseOS repo
mv /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Linux-BaseOS.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Linux-BaseOS.repo.bak
# Download mirror repo file
wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Linux-BaseOS.repo http://mirrors.aliyun.com/repo/Centos-vault-8.5.2111.repo

# Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Linux-AppStream.repo to include:
[appstream]
name=CentOS-8.5.2111 - AppStream - mirrors.aliyun.com
baseurl=http://mirrors.aliyun.com/centos-vault/8.5.2111/AppStream/$basearch/os/
gpgcheck=0
gpgkey=http://mirrors.aliyun.com/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-Official

Refresh the cache:

sudo yum clean all
sudo yum makecache

Installing and starting Cockpit

On CentOS 8 Cockpit is already installed. Enable the socket and start the service:

systemctl enable --now cockpit.socket
systemctl start cockpit

On CentOS 7 install the package and open the firewall:

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

Access the UI with a web browser at http://SERVER_IP:9090/ using any local Linux account (e.g., root).

Key Cockpit modules

Dashboard – displays CPU, memory, system information and hardware details.

Usage – real‑time graphs of CPU, memory, disk and network similar to top.

Storage – view file‑system layout, manage LVM volume groups and mount NFS shares.

Network – shows network interfaces and firewall status; allows enabling/disabling services.

Firewall – add or remove ports and services directly.

Podman – pull images and run containers; e.g., podman pull nginx and podman run -d -p 80:80 nginx.

Accounts – create, modify or delete Linux users without using useradd.

Software Updates – view available package updates and apply them from the UI.

Terminal – embedded shell for command‑line operations.

SELinux – view and toggle SELinux enforcement mode.

Reference

Official documentation: https://cockpit-project.org/documentation.html