WHEN YOU’RE RUNNING a home server or VPS, Docker is pretty great because you can add services without messing (too much) with the underlying system configuration. As we’ve seen with Nextcloud, though, even with just four Docker containers things become unwieldy. Portainer is a Docker management system that aims to restore order.
It comes in two parts—server and agent—which both ship as Docker containers. you’ll only need the server image for this initial foray. The agent is used to marshall Docker Swarms, which are another way of connecting containers together. Let’s start by creating a volume for data, and then firing up the image.