How to Host Docker

I have hosted a lot of stuff on a lot of system. Over the years of course I settled on docker as the way to setup applications and services on servers. But how do you host docker? I have hosted with docker desktop. Moved to docker on VM’s then shrink it to docker on LXC containers. I hae used Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Red Hat all sorts of hosts. In the end I have I circled back to Ubuntu systems. In the enterprise world we setup servers with code but at home going to effort of building a server for managing servers is a little overkill. Most people just want to set something up and go. How do we setup and go without building repeatable infrastructure like ansible. The answer is shell scripts.

Instead of telling you how to setup a server for docker, I am posting a script to setup a server for docker. ubuntu_docker_setup.sh. Copy it onto server on your first login and run it! The script installs neofetch because I like the server telling me what it is when I log in. Docker gets installed and portainer to manage docker. Not only does it install portainer the script creates a docker directory for the various docker containers a folder inside that directory for portainer and builds a docker-compose.yml for portainer then stands up portainer using docker compose. So by using the script you are all setup with an example of how to manage docker with code instead of trying to do everything with portainer or trying to launch containers with the docker command.

Here is the script https://github.com/mjh2901/ubuntu_docker_setup.git

How do you use the script?

Setup an Ubuntu LTS server, or an Ubuntu LTS LXC container.

Download the script

git clone https://github.com/mjh2901/ubuntu_docker_setup.git

If the git clone command failes you most likely just need to install git. Then try the git clone command again.

sudo apt-get install git

Enter the directory

cd ubuntu_docker_setup

Make the script executable

chmod u+x ubuntu_docker_setup.sh

Run the script

./ubuntu_docker_setup.sh

Watch the magic!

When its done the script will give you the web address of portainer so you can go straight in and start configuring things. You can also go look at your docker setup in the docker folder by going to users docker directory.

cd ~/docker

Go set up a machine and take control of docker.