Running Portainer using docker-compose and systemd

In this post we’ll show how to run Portainer Community Edition on a computer using docker-compose and systemd. In case you haven’t installed docker or docker-compose, see How to install docker and docker-compose on Ubuntu in 30 seconds.

If you already have a Portainer instance and want to run a Portainer Edge Agent on a remote computer, see Running Portainer Edge Agent using docker-compose and systemd!

First, create the directory where the docker-compose.yml will live and edit it:

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/portainer
sudo nano /var/lib/portainer/docker-compose.yml

Now paste this config file:

services:
  portainer:
    image: portainer/portainer
    command: -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock
    restart: always
    ports:
      - 9192:9000
      - 8000:8000
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - portainer_data:/data

volumes:
  portainer_data:

In this case, we’re exposing the Web UI on port 9192 since we’re using a reverse proxy setup in order to access the web UI. Using Portainer over HTTP without a HTTPS frontend is a security risk!

This is my nginx config that is used to reverse proxy my Portainer instance. Note that I generate the HTTPS config using certbot --nginx, hence it’s not shown here:

server {
    server_name  portainer.mydomain.com;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:9192/;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection "Upgrade";
        proxy_redirect default;
    }

    listen 80;
}

Now we can create the systemd service that will automatically start Portainer:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/portainer.service

[Unit]
Description=Portainer
Requires=docker.service
After=docker.service

[Service]
Restart=always
User=root
Group=docker
WorkingDirectory=/var/lib/portainer
# Shutdown container (if running) when unit is stopped
ExecStartPre=/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml down
# Start container when unit is started
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml up
# Stop container when unit is stopped
ExecStop=/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml down

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Now we can can enable autostart on boot and start Portainer:

sudo systemctl enable portainer.service
sudo systemctl start portainer.service