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Diego's Linux Corner

Docker environment GUI

This guide discusses on how to get a GUI that shows information of your docker environment that is not by using Docker Desktop.

Docker Desktop

Section titled “Docker Desktop”

As we all know (specially if you come from the Windows world), docker is synonymous to Docker Desktop which is, as it name implies a desktop app implementation that in the backend is powered by the docker engine.

I remember that I used to use it a lot, even at work, but at one point a manager asked the whole team to completely uninstall it, due to some licensing specificity. I am aware of it having a pro version, or whatnot. But the moment its free tier became an issue for a company that’s when I started to not rely on it anymore.

Portainer

Section titled “Portainer”

And so, instead of relying on some closed source, licensing app, we can look at open-source, free alternatives. One implementation of such an idea is Portainer.

You can access its repository and license terms at its Github.

So, how do you use it? It’s pretty simple, once you have docker installed. As a simple command, no extra GUI or things wrapping it. You can then run Portainer on its own container:

docker volume create portainer_data && \
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
  • We first create a volume so that we can persist things such as user data
  • We then run the container as a daemon
  • We bind two ports 8000 and 9443
  • We give the container a name
  • We tell the container to always start on engine initialization
  • We bind the hosts docker.sock runner to the container’s docker.sock that way the container can see all the docker engine stuff from the host (and it can display its info)
  • We also bind our docker volume previously created to the containers persistance directory
  • Lastly we state the portainer image that we will spin up (it’s the community edition which is totally free)

Once the container is running you should be able to just open up a browser and head to localhost:9443. On the first login you will have to create a user and a password (don’t forget about these).

Once the user is created, you should be able to go into the container, and immediately you should be able to visualize the local environment ready to be connected to. If not just refresh the page.

If you Live connect the GUI will immediately show you all sorts of information in regards to the current docker instance you are running.

  • images
  • containers
  • networks
  • volumes
  • and more

You get controls to start containers, delete, duplicate, same thing to images, volumes, and so on.

It is basically what Docker Desktop is, but on a web app and running on its own container. It’s pretty neat, and if you enough about web services, you can see how this opens up the possibility of literally exposing this website in a server so that you can allow someone to patch through and look at the status of the docker instance on a server by simply heading to a URL

Extra Notes

Section titled “Extra Notes”

Some Linux setups may differ but remember to have docker running first so that you can both run portainer’s container, and also have the engine powering it. Otherwise nothing can be alive:

  • sudo systemctl start docker
  • sudo docker ps -a

Also, docker has to run as sudo. So it should always be prefixed with it.