Cockpit Top (ctop)

A btop-style system monitor as a native Cockpit plugin — per-core CPU with braille graphs, memory/disk, network, GPU, sensors, containers, and a live, sortable process table with kill/signal, tree view, and deep-links into Cockpit. Plain ES modules + <canvas>, no framework, no runtime dependencies.

More Cockpit plugins

• Explorer — a full file manager for the Cockpit web console: browse/edit files, integrated terminal, git, and more. (Cockpit Top can deep-link a process's cwd straight into it.)
• IF TV — turns the Cockpit web console into a full IPTV client: live TV, movies, series, an EPG guide, and host-side transcoding.
• Manifest — a download manager for the Cockpit web console: torrents, magnets, and HTTP/FTP/Metalink files via a per-user aria2c daemon.
• Pilot — provisions and manages a self-hosted RustDesk remote-desktop server (hbbs/hbbr + the rustdesk-api control plane) from the Cockpit web console: device inventory, address books, users, audit logs, and TLS.
• Hangar — backups for the Cockpit web console: restic/rclone for your files, ReaR for whole-machine bare-metal recovery, and a drill that boots the rescue image in a throwaway VM to prove recovery actually works.

Features

• CPU — per-core braille mini-graphs, per-core temps, package temp, frequency, load average, uptime, clock, and the CPU model. A full-width gradient braille graph like btop.
• Memory — used / cached / available / free + swap meters, per-mount usage bars, and per-disk read/write I/O graphs (loopN devices — snap images etc. — are hidden by default; loops toolbar toggle shows them).
• Network — auto-scaling up/down braille graphs, current rate plus peak (Top) and cumulative (Total).
• GPU — NVIDIA util + VRAM + temperature + power (via nvidia-smi), hidden when absent.
• Sensors — every hwmon temperature and fan RPM beyond the CPU package.
• Containers — live podman and docker container CPU / memory / net I/O, merged into one table (an engine column appears when both are running containers).
• Processes — sortable table (kill / TERM / signal, renice), filter/search, tree view, a per-PID CPU sparkline, open sockets, and deep-links to the process's systemd Service, its Logs, and its working directory in a file browser — Cockpit Files or the Explorer plugin, auto-detected (the button hides if neither is installed).
• History — back-in-time CPU history from the PCP archive (optional; enable via boxes ▾).
• Themes — loads any of btop's .theme files installed on the host and recolors live.
• Toolbar — pause, refresh interval, theme picker, °C/°F, B/s ↔ b/s, loop-device show/hide, file-browser target, per-box show/hide, threshold alerts + browser notifications, and keyboard shortcuts (p pause, +/− interval, f filter).
• Fits the window — the whole plugin fills the viewport; long columns and the process list scroll inside their box.
• Self-update — one-click update from GitHub releases.

Data comes from Cockpit's built-in metrics1 internal channel (reads /proc and /sys, no PCP required for the live view), plus a small ps poll for the process list.

Themes

Pick any btop theme from the toolbar — colors, gradients, and background recolor live.

Process detail & Cockpit deep-links

Click any process for a live CPU sparkline, open sockets, kill/signal, renice, and jump straight to its Service, Logs, or cwd in Cockpit.

Install

System-wide (recommended)

sudo make install
sudo systemctl try-restart cockpit

Then reload Cockpit and open Tools → Cockpit Top.

Development (no root)

make devel-install     # symlink into ~/.local/share/cockpit/ctop
# edit, then reload the browser tab
make devel-uninstall

Package for other machines

make zip                            # ctop-<version>.zip
rpmbuild -bb packaging/ctop.spec    # noarch RPM (cockpit-ctop)

Requirements

• cockpit-bridge ≥ 215 (for the metrics1 channel). Nothing else is required for the core view.

Optional integrations that light up automatically when present:

Box / feature	Needs
GPU	nvidia-smi
Containers	podman and/or docker (docker rows use the session user's socket access, else Cockpit admin privilege)
History	an active pmlogger + Cockpit's PCP support (bundled in cockpit-bridge on RHEL/Fedora; cockpit-pcp on some distros)
Sensors / battery	hwmon sensors under /sys/class/hwmon, /sys/class/power_supply
Themes	btop .theme files under /usr/share/btop/themes

No Node.js, no build step, and no runtime dependencies are shipped to the host — the plugin is just static files.

Self-update

Cockpit Top checks its GitHub repo for a newer release on startup (and when you click the version badge in the toolbar). When a newer version is available the badge becomes ⬆ update to vX.Y.Z; confirming downloads the release, installs it (asks for admin), and restarts Cockpit. Configure the source repo via the updateRepo setting (default ismetozalp/ctop).

Settings

All toolbar choices persist in localStorage and are re-applied on reload. Thresholds and the update repo are in the same store.

Development & tests

npm test            # unit tests (Node built-in runner) — pure logic + module-load smoke test
make test-e2e       # thorough Playwright end-to-end (drives the real UI in Cockpit)
make test-e2e-smoke # quick e2e

The e2e reads Cockpit credentials from ~/.config/claude/ctop-e2e/creds (two lines: user, password), kept outside the repo. See test/e2e/README.md.

License

Apache-2.0 © 2026 ismetozalp