Running and managing containers on Linux may sound like a daunting task, and to be fair, it can be. For those of you that want to run containers and do so on a platform that’s easy to get started with, then look no further than Portainer! In this video Jay goes over the process of setting it up on Ubuntu 24.04 and running your first container.

Commands used in this Video

Set up the required keys

The following commands were used to install the certificates that apt needs to verify Docker’s packages:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl

sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings

sudo curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc

sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc

Add the Docker repository

After setting up the required keys, the next order of business is installing the repository that we’ll use to install Docker.

echo \
"deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
$(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME") stable" | \
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update

Now that the repository has been added, let’s install the packages we need:

sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin

After that, we can run a test container to see whether or not Docker is working:

sudo docker run hello-world

If it bothers you to add sudo to every command while working with docker, consider adding your user account to the docker group:

sudo usermod -aG docker jay

If you do that, once you log out and log in again you won’t need sudo anymore:

docker run hello-world

Install Portainer

First, let’s create a volume that Portainer will use in order to save persistent data:

docker volume create portainer_data

Then, we can install Portainer. The following command will install Portainer by downloading and running the official container image:

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

Have fun!

At this point, Portainer is installed. In the video, an example is shown where FreshRSS is deployed using Portainer. The container image that was used is this one. Thanks to linuxserver.io for continually providing exceptional container images, like the one used in the video.