Portainer: Web-Based Docker GUI For Remote Or Local Use

In my search of a Docker GUI that can be used remotely I came across Portainer Community Edition, a lightweight, open source (though Portainer Agent is not open source) web-based Docker GUI that can be used to manage containers, images, networks, and volumes.

The tool, which is compatible with the standalone Docker engine and with Docker Swarm, is simple to both use and deploy, being available as a Docker container itself. It can be used both on the local machine as well as a remote Docker GUI.

Portainer features:

Start, stop, kill, restart, pause, resume, rename, remove or add Docker containers, create image from container, change container restart policies, and join or leave networks
View Docker container stats (memory, CPU and network usage, and processes) and logs
Run a console for command line access to containers
Pull, remove, import and export images
View network details, add or remove networks
Add or remove volumes and see volume details
See available stacks and create new stacks
Easily deploy common applications via Portainer application templates
Endpoint management
User management

Portainer also has a registry manager that can push and pull images to and from the registry, but to be able to browse registries and manipulate their content you'll need the Portainer Registry Manager extension, which is a paid enhancement.

You can try Portainer without deploying it, by using its public demo instance - visit http://demo.portainer.io/ and login with the username admin and the password tryportainer.

Install Portainer

Portainer is available as a Docker container. To deploy the Portainer Server on Linux or on Windows 10 Docker Host running in Linux containers mode, use (it needs Docker to be installed on the machine on which you want to deploy Portainer):

docker volume create portainer_data

docker run -d -p 9000:9000 --name portainer --restart always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer

You can then access the Portainer web UI by visiting http://IP:9000/, where IP is the IP of the machine Portainer runs on. If you're want to access the UI on the local machine, visit http://localhost:9000.

The first time you launch the Portainer web UI, you'll need to create a new user, and connect Portainer to the Docker environment you want to manage: local, remote, a Portainer agent, or Microsoft Azure ACI:

For deploying Portainer with advanced options, including persistent data, deploy as a Docker Swarm service, securing it using SSL and more, check out the Portainer deployment page.