In this section, we will add Portainer to help us in managing our Docker containers. You can find more details about it here. To integrate Portainer into our EC2 project, we can follow these steps:

Install Portainer Container

First, let’s connect to our EC2 instance.

Next, create a new Docker volume for Portainer:

docker volume create portainer_data

Now, let’s run the Portainer container:

docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9443:9443 --name portainer --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer-ce:latest

Then, verify if the container is running.

Open Port for Portainer

Portainer is running on port 9443, so we need to add new port inside our security groups.

Let’s select Custom TCP and set the port range to 9443, and for the source set to Anywhere-IPv4, then click Save rules button to finish the configuration.

Login to Portainer

To log in to Portainer, open the public IP of our EC2 then add 9443 port. If we are connecting for the first time, your browser might block access. Click the Show advanced button or a similar option depending on your browser, then click the link bellow.

Then, in Portainer page, we need to add username and password.

After you finish the previous process, we can look around inside the dasboard. In Home section we can click local environments to see the currently running containers.

When you open the Stacks page, we can see that we have limited control to our project. For the next part, we will migrate our project inside Portainer so we can manage it easily.