Tool Spotlight: Portainer

Portainer is a self-hosted web UI. You can use it to view the state of your containers, and interact with them.

The Portainer UI.

What is it for?

A UI to interact with your Docker host or Swarm cluster. Or just to get an overview.

• See how many resources your containers are using.
• Get details about your Docker containers in a good-looking graphical interface.

You might be interested if…

• You like graphical interfaces, and would like to use the Docker CLI a bit less.
• You are running multiple containers and need to check their status and behaviour.
• You’re using Docker containers (not Kubernetes) on a single host OR running swarm mode across multiple nodes

What you need to know

It’s …

• Free.
• Open source.
• For Docker and Swarm (not Kubernetes).
• Easy to get started: deploy it in a Docker container.

You can …

• Deploy new containers.
• Create users for the interface.
• See stats around your Docker host, containers and more.
• Run containers (and stacks) using built-in “app templates”.
• Run the interface on localhost, and forward the port via SSH, instead of making it available to the whole internet.

Take a look

You can see a lot of the features in screenshots here.

Try it

You can go to the demo site, enter demo credentials and interact with the tool. Read the instructions here.

Links

• Homepage
• GitHub

An alternative

You can set up something like dockprom to get an overview of your Docker host. It’s a mix of Grafana, Prometheus, AlertManager, NodeExporter and cAdvisor, providing nice dashboards with metrics on your containers.

For more options, check out this list of other Docker GUIs.