QUICK TIP!
Looking to pull images from sources other than the official DockerHub? Navigate to Registries under Settings and click Add registry to do so. Six providers can be added quickly, including an authenticated DockerHub account, or you can add your own secure custom registry.
Docker is a fantastic tool, enabling you to run all kinds of applications, tools and services in self-contained spaces without the need for a full-blown virtual machine. But controlling it from the command line can be tricky. The obvious solution when running Docker on a desktop is to pair it with Docker Compose, the official GUI frontend, but what if you don’t like Docker Compose, or you’re running Docker on a server with no desktop?
The answer lies in Portainer (www.portainer.io) – a web-based frontend you can use to control Docker from any PC on your local network – or even further afield if you pair it with a reverse proxy. Portainer’s user-friendly interface is packed with powerful features to make it a worthy alternative to
Docker Compose. It can be used to manage all the instances of Docker across your network from one central place, and also works with Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Nomad. Portainer comes in both free and paid-for editions – we’ll be focssing on the free Community Edition version in this tutorial.
Installing Portainer
We’re assuming you already have a form of Docker installed on your machine – see for details of installing it in Ubuntu if not. Portainer ships as a Docker instance – it can be run as part of a Docker Swarm or in Kubernetes (see for details), but for the purposes of this tutorial, we’ll focus on running it with a local
