Why I Abandoned Web VPS Panels and Built My Own Desktop Control Plane in Rust

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!