Before we roll up our sleeves and dive into installing and using Portainer, we should discuss the background of the project. The first edition of this book covered Docker UI. Docker UI was written by Michael Crosby, who handed the project over to Kevan Ahlquist after about a year of development. It was at this stage, due to trademark concerns, that the project was renamed UI for Docker.

Development of UI for Docker continued up until the point Docker started to accelerate the introduction of features such as Swarm mode into the core Docker Engine. It was around this time that the UI for Docker project was forked into the project that would become Portainer, which had its first major release in June 2016.

Since their first public release, the team behind Portainer estimate around 70 percent of the code has already been rewritten, and by mid-2017, new features were added, such as role-based controls and Docker Compose support. They believe that the remaining UI for Docker code will have been rewritten by the end of 2017.

In December 2016, a notice was committed to the UI for Docker GitHub repository stating that the project is now deprecated and that Portainer should be used.

The following is what you will see when navigating your browser to the Portainer website, http://www.portainer.io/:

We won't be following the instructions in the GET IT NOW link. Instead, we will make a few tweaks.