Setup Portainer

Im going to be using Portainer to manage my docker instance, purely as its nicer to use a GUI than do everything from the command line. Once finished, Portainer will only be accessible over the Tailscale network so the public wont have access.

First download the YML file:

curl -L https://downloads.portainer.io/ce-lts/portainer-agent-stack.yml -o portainer-agent-stack.yml

Then deploy the Portainer stack that was downloaded:

docker stack deploy -c portainer-agent-stack.yml portainer

You can verify its running by running:

docker ps

Which will list 2 containers, an agent and portainer-ce containers.

You can now log in to Portainer from a web browser on your computer by visiting:

https://<tailscale-IP>:9443/

Replacing <tailscale-ip> with your Tailscale IP address.

It will ask you to setup a password etc as its the first time visited.

You can now visually see and edit your docker system using the web UI.

We installed the free community edition of Portainer. If you want to upgrade to the business edition then you can do that at the top of the web page. You can get up to 3 nodes free, but then start to charge for more nodes. Most things you can do from the community edition but it does make some things like backups better, so worth getting the business one if you aren't going over 3 nodes.