Portainer is a web UI for Docker. It shows containers, images, volumes and networks, and it can deploy whole Compose projects as stacks, including straight from a Git repository. The portainer/portainer repository had about 38,700 GitHub stars on October 21, 2026, and the portainer/portainer-ce image had passed 1.5 billion pulls on Docker Hub. The current Community Edition (CE) release is 2.45.2 LTS, published on October 8, 2026.

This guide installs Portainer CE with Docker Compose, gets past the five-minute admin setup timeout, moves an app that was started with plain docker compose into Portainer without losing its data, and sets up a stack that redeploys itself when you push to Git. It ends with a backup and an upgrade from 2.45.1 to 2.45.2.

TL;DR:

Run portainer/portainer-ce:2.45.2 with the Docker socket and a portainer_data volume, and publish only 127.0.0.1:9443 .…