What is the purpose of Docker-compose and Portainer?

Question

I am an engineering newbie who is trying to learn something while experimenting with Raspberry Pi. I wanted to try out Docker, so I followed along with a tutorial, which installed Docker, docker-compose and via that, Portainer.

Now I am a bit lost. What is the purpose of docker-compose? What is the purpose of Portainer?

And if I want to add some container like NextCloud/openVPN how do I do that? Thru Portainer? Or docker-compose?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Portainer is just a visualized tool for Docker suite. You can run docker commands everywhere a portainer-agent runs as long as you have access to it and it is not an official Docker product.

Docker-compose from the other is a set of docker commands as part of docker engine (community and enterprise) that will help you to orchestrate containers in a single node (PC or VM). If you want to orchestrate more than a single node, you should read about Docker-Swarm or Kubernetes.

A very nice article to understand swarm vs compose differences is here.

Portainer is just a tool on top of Docker that gives you a UI for free because Native Docker Universal Control Panel is on enterprise edition only.