I have a pretty good understanding of docker from using the command like, but I like to visually see what’s going on. I find it helps me gain a better understanding of what’s doing what, and even exposing settings and configuration options that are not really mentioned or talked about when using the command line.
I starting searching around for a web based GUI to manage all my docker containers, and it wasn’t long before I found portainer. Yacht was also another option, but I found it lacking in comparison to what portainer can do.
I have 12 Stacks (which are docker-compose builds) and a total of 23 containers. Some of those are not a part of a docker compose, and are just built using the command string and a few environment variables.
Portainer also allows you to manage docker swarms, and Kubernetes clusters too. and you can manage multiple nodes too. I did have setup a second node for running LibreNMS in a container on another host (as it needs a lot of resources). so I could connect to a small portainer node container running on the other node, and manage it from the same console! Sweet!
You can also build container and stack templates, to make deploying and re-deploying a stack super fast (the whole idea of docker and containers). I did this a lot when I was testing Oauth plugins for WordPress. as you can see, I also added a bunch of others I so I can re-deploy any of these super quick!
In trying to get a few other things done, I have found that adding a network to a container was super easy, and then also setting a static IP was also easy, although it wasn’t very intuitive the first time I did it. When you are in the container, you can just select the network from the dropdown, and hit add! its that easy
The container still stays connected to the original network, but also connects another interface to this new network that you have selected, and exposes any ports that are open by default to this new network. Because of the way I am doing the cloud flare tunnel I have no need to expose any ports externally.
The other thing that is nice, but I think that could be made better / more intuitive as well is updating of containers and stacks. You can do it, and pull a fresh image, but it took me a few times to work out exactly how it worked.
You can get a free business licence of portainer for up to 5 nodes, which I have done, and now have full functionality.