Why You Should Use Portainer Instead of the Console: Introduction and Quick Start

• Why This Post?
• What is Portainer?
• Practical Section
  • Deploying Portainer
  • Setting Up Portainer
  • Deploying an Application
• Conclusion

For those who want to get started right away, here’s the link to the practical section

Why This Post?

I’ve often noticed that many people shy away from the command line. This is not particularly surprising, as the command line requires a certain level of technical understanding and can be intimidating, especially for newcomers and inexperienced users. After all, many technologies offer a graphical user interface (GUI) in addition to the command line, which is often perceived as more intuitive.

Especially with more complex commands that span multiple lines, it can be difficult to keep track and avoid errors. For this reason, a graphical user interface like Portainer can be a great help in simplifying the management of Docker containers and making it easier for less experienced users to handle them.

Docker does offer a GUI (Docker Desktop), but it is more geared towards developers and not intended for production use. Moreover, Docker Desktop only runs on Windows and Mac.

What is Portainer?

Portainer is a web GUI for Docker, which itself runs in Docker containers. Portainer supports not only Docker as a platform but also Docker Swarm and Kubernetes.

Practical Section

Deploying Portainer

The instructions can be found on the Portainer.io website. In this example, the Community Edition is used.

A running Docker host is required

The following steps must be followed in the console. Don’t worry, only two commands need to be used in the console.

First, a volume must be created.

docker volume create portainer_data

Then, Portainer can be deployed with a single command.

docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9443:9443 --name portainer --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer-ce:latest

After a short moment, Portainer should be accessible at https://localhost:9443.

Setting Up Portainer

In the first step, the user must be created and a password set.

You will then be taken directly to an overview of the different environments. Since we only have one Docker host in this example, only this one will be displayed.

After clicking on the environment, you will reach the overview. From this point, you can easily access the various functions and overviews.

In principle, that’s it. Portainer is set up quickly, and you can now work with the intuitive GUI. I will write about the most important features of Portainer in another blog post. In addition to the normal functions needed to manage Docker, Portainer offers several other features.

Deploying an Application

What would a brief introduction be without an example?

In this example, a WordPress instance is deployed using a Docker Compose file. This consists of a database and a WordPress container.

To do this, we click on Stacks in the Portainer dashboard and then on Add Stack.

There are several ways to deploy a stack. The simplest option is to use the integrated web editor. To do this, click on Web Editor.

Now a name for the stack can be assigned, and the content of the Docker Compose file can be inserted.

services:
  db:
    image: mariadb:10.6.4-focal
    command: '--default-authentication-plugin=mysql_native_password'
    volumes:
      - db_data:/var/lib/mysql
    restart: always
    environment:
      - MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=somewordpress
      - MYSQL_DATABASE=wordpress
      - MYSQL_USER=wordpress
      - MYSQL_PASSWORD=wordpress
    expose:
      - 3306
      - 33060
  wordpress:
    image: wordpress:latest
    volumes:
      - wp_data:/var/www/html
    ports:
      - 80:80
    restart: always
    environment:
      - WORDPRESS_DB_HOST=db
      - WORDPRESS_DB_USER=wordpress
      - WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD=wordpress
      - WORDPRESS_DB_NAME=wordpress
volumes:
  db_data:
  wp_data:

Then the stack can be deployed with a click on Deploy the stack.

Our WordPress instance should now be accessible in a few seconds at localhost:80.

Conclusion

Portainer is a powerful tool that graphically represents and simplifies all Docker functions. The GUI was developed entirely according to the KISS principle and is very easy to use.

Portainer minimizes the room for errors and makes it incredibly easy to deploy and manage an application.

In another blog post, I will showcase the five most important features and demonstrate why Portainer is much more than just a GUI.

Sources:

• Portainer.io
• Container Image
• WordPress Compose