Introduction

Portainer is an open-source management tool used for the orchestration of containerized applications, in the form of a web dashboard. The portainer itself is instantiated as a container that works as a Virtual Appliance.

In the context of 5G and Mosaic5G/OpenAirInterface, this tool can be valuable in order to more easily and efficiently manage all of the containerized applications. For our use case, Portainer can help address challenges associated with using a command-line-based operating system like Ubuntu Server

Implementation

Tutorial followed

Install Portainer w/ Docker on Linux | Portainer Documentation

Pre-requisites

Firstly, make sure the Docker is running and fully functional: docker --version

Additionally, the docker-compose plugin by running: docker-compose

Expected output should be:

# for docker
Docker version 24.0.5, build ced0996
# for cocker-compose
Docker Compose version v2.20.2-desktop.1

If not, please go to: Docker Installation Guides

Deployment

Normally, Portainer is implemented directly on the hosts OSs with a single command:

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:2.21.4

Argument	Description
docker run	Command to create and run a new container.
-d	Runs the container in detached mode (in the background).
-p 8000:8000	Maps port 8000 on the host to port 8000 in the container - TCP tunnel server only used for specific purposes
-p 9443:9443	Maps port 9443 on the host to port 9443 in the container - used for the secure Portainer web interface
--name portainer	Assigns the name portainer to the container.
--restart=always	Ensures the container automatically restarts if it stops or if the host is rebooted.
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock	Mounts the Docker socket from the host to the container, enabling Portainer to manage Docker resources directly.
-v portainer_data:/data	Creates and mounts a volume named portainer_data to persist Portainer's configuration and state.
portainer/portainer-ce:2.21.4	Specifies the Portainer Community Edition (CE) image

In our case, and to better expedite the process we used a docker-compose.yml file - Source

version: "3"
services:
  portainer:
    image: portainer/portainer-ce:latest
    ports:
      - 9005:9443
     volumes:
       - data:/data
       - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
    restart: unless-stopped
volumes:
  data:

Note: the internal port bind number is changed due to firewall restrictions set in place by the XenOrchestra Virtual Appliance

Running

In order to run the container make sure you are located in the same folder as the docker-compose.yml file and run: docker-compose up -d.