Doctainer-Lab – Centralized Docker Management

🎯 Purpose

Lightweight container orchestration environment using Portainer for GUI-based Docker management across multiple hosts, eliminating CLI overhead for complex deployments.

🏗️ Architecture

• Portainer CE (Community Edition)
• Docker Engine (Container runtime)
• Remote Agents (Multi-host management)
• Docker Compose (Stack orchestration)

⚙️ Technical Implementation

Server Deployment

# Create persistent volume
docker volume create portainer_data

# Deploy Portainer server
docker run -d -p 9443:9443 -p 8000:8000 \
  --name=portainer \
  --restart=always \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  -v portainer_data:/data \
  portainer/portainer-ce

Container Management

Portainer Dashboard

Active Containers

Multi-Host Configuration

# On remote hosts - install Portainer agent
docker run -d -p 9001:9001 \
  --name portainer_agent \
  --restart=always \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  portainer/agent

Environment Dashboard

🎯 Key Features

• ✅ Web-based container management
• ✅ Multi-host orchestration
• ✅ Docker Compose stack deployment via GUI
• ✅ Real-time container monitoring
• ✅ Centralized image and volume management

📊 Use Cases

• Home lab container management
• Multi-environment testing
• Team collaboration on Docker projects
• Enterprise container visualization
• DevOps workflow simplification

🔧 Stack Deployment

Deploy multi-container applications through Portainer GUI:

version: '3'
services:
  web:
    image: nginx:alpine
    ports:
      - "80:80"
  db:
    image: postgres:13
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: example

Deploy via: Portainer GUI → Stacks → Add Stack → Paste YAML → Deploy

📈 Technical Highlights

• Agent-based architecture for secure remote management
• Persistent volume integration for data retention
• Web interface eliminating CLI complexity
• Real-time container state monitoring
• Cross-host resource visibility

🔒 Security Considerations

• Self-signed SSL certificates for HTTPS
• Docker socket access controls
• Agent authentication and authorization
• Network segmentation support

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Built with: Docker | Portainer | Docker Compose | Linux

Tags: docker portainer container-orchestration devops home-lab multi-host