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Setting up an Ubuntu server [part 2]: Portainer and Nginx

Josep Monjo

Josep Monjo

• 2 min read
Photo by Florian Krumm / Unsplash
Setting up an Ubuntu server [part 2]: Portainer and Nginx

Using Docker is one of the cleanest and easiest ways to maintain our web apps organized, up and running.

We certainly could do it using the docker cli, but there’s a much better way to do it using a GUI named Portainer.

To install portainer just need to create a volume and run the portainer container like so.

docker volume create portainer_data

docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9000:9000 --name=portainer --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer-ce

We will be able to access portainer though the port 9000 (later we will configure nginx proxy to access outside our network without opening extra ports).

http://<ip-of-the-machine>:9000

Nginx proxy manager

Nginx is a very well known web server. We could use it right straight away with config files, but as we are not devops but developers we prefer using a nice web app. Here’s where Nginx proxy manager enters in scene.

Go to your home folder and create an nginx folder. You could name it whatever you want, It is just a workspace.

mkdir nginx
cd nginx

Create a docker-compose.yml file

$ nano docker-compose.yml

Edit the file according to the values of the config.json file

version: '3'
services:
  app:
    image: 'jc21/nginx-proxy-manager:latest'
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - '80:80'
      - '81:81'
      - '443:443'
    volumes:
      - ./data:/data
      - ./letsencrypt:/etc/letsencrypt

Before you can run the docker compose without sudo, you need to add your user to docker group.

sudo groupadd docker

sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

Then you may need to logout and log back in or run this with sudo:

docker-compose up -d

Go to port 81 to enter the web interface.

http://<ip-of-the-machine>:81

These are the default credentials.

Email:    admin@example.com
Password: changeme

Modify the credentials on your first login, and that’s all, you’re good to go. We have a very intuitive and easy to use proxy for our Docker apps.

The first proxy you’ll want to add is the nginx manager itself. And the second one Portainer.

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