Setting up Portainer

Run the container

Portainer needs access to the Docker socket to manage anything else running on the host, that's what the socket mount below is for.

services:
  portainer:
    image: portainer/portainer-ce:latest
    container_name: portainer
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - "9443:9443"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - ./data:/data

Set the admin password

This is worth doing right away: Portainer requires the initial admin password to be set within a few minutes of the container's first start, and locks that step out if the window passes (fixable by restarting the container, but easy to avoid).

Browse the local environment

Reachable at port 9443, it auto-detects the local Docker engine as an environment, no separate connection setup needed for managing containers on this same machine.