---
title: portainer
description: Quick overview of portainer and setup
date: 2025-02-04
lastmod: 2025-02-04
author: wompmacho
showHero: false # needed to hide "hero banner"
---

## What is Portainer?

`Portainer` is a lightweight, powerful container management platform that provides a graphical user interface (GUI) to manage your Docker, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes environments. It essentially sits on top of your container runtime, allowing you to control complex infrastructure without needing to master the command line.

Portainer provides a very easy to understand user interface for deploying other docker containers. The great thing is, Portainer
is a container itself, so it should run automatically following setup and allow
you a nice gui interface for your docker environment via a web browser. I
particularly love its dashboard because you get a great snapshot of your running
containers, can easily restart and monitor your containers, but most importantly
edit and deploy docker-compose files via the "stacks" page.

- Portainer CE is free version
- [Install
  Guide](https://docs.portainer.io/start/install-ce/server/docker/linux)
- Create the volume that Portainer Server will use to store its database

  ``` bash
  docker volume create portainer_data
  ```

- Download and install the Portainer Server container

  ``` bash
  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
  ```

- Verify the container is running with docker ps

  ``` bash
  root@server:~# docker ps
  CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                          COMMAND                  CREATED       STATUS      PORTS                                                                                  NAMES             
  de5b28eb2fa9   portainer/portainer-ce:latest  "/portainer"             2 weeks ago   Up 9 days   0.0.0.0:8000->8000/tcp, :::8000->8000/tcp, 0.0.0.0:9443->9443/tcp, :::9443->9443/tcp   portainer
  ```

- Navigate to https://HOST_IP_ADDRESS:9443 and create a user so you can log in
  to the Portainer web interface.