Setting up an Ubuntu server [part 1]: Docker

Ok. You’ve just got a home server or you’ve hired a vps Ubuntu server. I’m not a devops guy so I need a step by step guide. What do you need to do?

I usually follow the steps on Digital Ocean website, so I’ll just do a small summary here based on that.

First we need to ssh as root:

‌$ ssh root@your_server_ip

Then we add a new user

‌ # adduser test

And give it administrative privileges

‌ # usermod -aG sudo test

If we want to access via ssh keys we can copy the root user keys to our account.

‌# rsync --archive --chown=test:test ~/.ssh /home/test

Setting up docker

One of the easiest ways to get up and running with our web apps is to use Docker.

Let’s first refresh our repos.

‌$ sudo apt update

Then we need some https stuff

‌$ sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common

Add the Docker GPG repo key.

‌$ curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

Add the Docker repo. Here is the command for Ubuntu 20.04.

‌$ sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu focal stable"

Update the packages list.

‌$ sudo apt update

We force the system to install Docker from our new source and not from the internal Ubuntu repo.

$ apt-cache policy docker-ce

And finally install Docker.

‌$ sudo apt install docker-ce

We will need docker compose too, so we’re going to install it now.

sudo curl -L https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.21.2/docker-compose-`uname -s`-`uname -m` -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

In the next article we’ll see how to setup Portainer and Nginx proxy manager to install and manage our apps and sites.