In a previous tutorial, I explained how to get Docker and Docker Compose setup. Docker is an amazing tool to maximize your resources allowing you to run multiple applications easily on a single server. While you can spin up containers using Docker commands, if you have a lot of variables to pass in, this can be hard. That’s where Docker Composer comes in. Docker Composer makes managing and spinning up containers a lot easier but what if you want a GUI instead of commands lines and YAML files? Well, that’s where Portainer comes in.
Portainer runs inside a Docker container then, it gives you an easy-to-use web interface to manage the rest of your containers from. This can make the task of learning Docker easier and hopefully, will cause less frustration. Before we can start using Portainer, we need to get it set up. As documentation can be updated from time to time, let’s refer to the official documentation from Portainer. This documentation is for installing version 2.11.
First, we need to create a volume for the data Portainer will store. Next, we’ll download and install the Portainer Server container. And with that, we should have our Portainer container. We can check if it’s running by using the command sudo docker ps. You should see a line showing a container for Protainer if everything is running as expected.
From here, we can go ahead and access our Portianer web interface by typing in the FQDN of your server and adding :9443 at the end to specify port 9443. It’s worth noting, if you have set-up a firewall on your server, you will need to allow both port 80 and 443 through your firewall.
We won’t be going over how to use Portainer in this tutorial so, for that, I recommend checking out Portainer’s tutorials.