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Portainer Agent

Portainer is a web UI for Docker which allows us to have an insight on all the containers running on our server.

The Portainer agent allows you to expose the machine's Docker management to another Portainer service hosted elsewhere. We're using the agent in this case to use the main Portainer service to manage this one.

There is an official image for this service that we'll use: portainer/agent.

Pre-Installation

We'll create a folder in the main user's home where all the service's data will be saved.

mkdir ~/services/management/portainer-agent

Docker Compose

Portainer Agent will be run using Docker Compose. The content of the docker-compose.yml file is as follows:

services:
  agent:
    image: portainer/agent:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 9001:9001
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - /var/lib/docker/volumes:/var/lib/docker/volumes
    environment:
      TZ: America/Guayaquil

Add to Portainer

In your main Portainer service,

  1. Head over to Environments > Add environment.
  2. Pick Docker Standalone and click on Start wizard.
  3. Select Agent, set a Name for your agent and paste your server's address with 9001 as the port into Environment address.
  4. Finally, click Connect.

And that's it, you can now manage your server's Docker services from your main Portainer service.

Running

Start up the service with:

docker compose up -d

That's it! The service will auto-start on system startup and restart on failure.