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I actually have Portainer set up and running, and I even spun up a few simple containers in it. Unfortunately I did so by following a guide to complete a specific task. I completed the task successfully, but now I have a Portainer install that I don't understand in the slightest, and don't know how to update it or any of the containers in it, or really do anything that wasn't covered in the guide I followed (which I now cannot find). I found a YouTube video that tries to explain Portainer, but I don't know the terminology of Docker enough to understand what they are saying, and I haven't found a Docker video simple enough to bring me up to speed.
The easiest way to think about docker is to consider it a type of virtual machine, like something you'd use VirtualBox for.
So let's say you run Windows, but want to try out Linux. You'd could install Ubuntu in a VirtualBox VM, and then install software that works on Ubuntu in that VM, and it's separate from Windows.
Docker is similar to this in that a docker container for a piece off software often includes an entire operating system within it, complete with all of the correct versions of drivers that the software needs to function. This is all in a sandbox/container that does not really interact with the host operating system.
As to why this is convenient: Let's say that you have a computer running Ubuntu natively/bare metal. It has a certain version of python installed that you need to run the applications you use. But there's some new software you want to try that uses a later version of python that will break your other apps if you upgrade.
The developer of that software you want to try makes a docker version available. There's a docker-compose.yml file that specifies things like the port the application will be available on, the time zone your computer is in, the location of the docker files on dockerhub, etc. You can modify this file if you like, and when you are done, you type
docker compose up -din the terminal (in the same directory as the docker-compose.yml file).Docker will then read the compose file, download the required files from the repository, extract them, set up the network and the web server and configure everything else specified in the compose file. Then you open a browser, type in the address of the machine the compose file is on, followed by the port number in the compose file (ex: http://192.168.1.100:5000), and boom, there's your software.
You can use the new software with the newer version of python at the same time as the old stuff installed directly on your machine.
You can leave it running all the time, or bring it down by typing
docker compose down. Need to upgrade to a new version? Bring the container down, typedocker compose pull, which tells docker to pull the latest version from the repository, thendocker compose up -dto bring the updated version back up again.Portainer is just a GUI that runs docker commands "under the hood".