Although I’m more than comfortable using command line tools to manage things there are times where a GUI is just more convenient. Pruning old containers, images and volumes in Docker are all things that are easier much to manage under a new tool I saw via twitter the other day. Portainer promises to make the task of managing Docker a bit easier and they’ve made good progress on delivering on that promise.  Getting up and running with it is incredibly simple because, as you’d expect, it’s available as a Docker image.  Simply issue the following this slightly Mac specific command:

docker run -d -p 9000:9000 -v "/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock" -v portainer:/data --name portainer portainer/portainer

This will get Portainer up and running on your system. If you’re on a Linux system you can skip mapping docker.sock. The other mapping just gives a persistent store for the little bit of data Portainer generates.  For full documentation visit their documentation site.

Found myself with an odd situation when running Jenkins using Docker. The time displayed was correct but claimed it was UTC which lead to some inconsistent behavior. The best way to resolve this is to force the Docker container to use the correct timezone from the host system.

To do so, add the following to your run command:

-v /etc/timezone:/etc/timezone -v /etc/localtime:/etc/localtime