Introduction

I’ve recently tried Portainer to manage all of my docker containers on my Synology NAS. A single docker-compose file caused already issues, e.g. the timeout for the docker compose up command had to be increased and for each small change I had to shut down all containers. With Portainer, I start a single portainer docker container and can manage all other containers through this single container.

I’ve started with Portainer 2.17.0 and today Portainer 2.17.1 was released. Time to upgrade my Portainer installation. But how does this work? I’ve already used the docker image tagged latest, which is obviously not the newest anymore.

Update the container

I’ve started my installation of Portainer with this command:

docker run -d -p 9000:9000 -p 9443:9443 \
    --name=portainer_ee \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    -v /volume1/docker/portainer_ee/data:/data \
    -v /volume1/docker/portainer_ee/certs:/certs \
    --restart=always \
    portainer/portainer-ee:latest \
    --sslcert /certs/portainer.crt \
    --sslkey /certs/portainer.key

Notice the volume where I’ve mounted the data. This will ensure that my data survives the following steps.

docker stop portainer_ee

docker rm portainer_ee

docker pull portainer/portainer-ee:latest

Now start portainer again.

Update an agent

My Raspberry Pi3b+ runs also portainer, but as an agent. Its started with this command:

docker run -d \
  -p 9001:9001 \
  --name portainer_agent \
  --restart=always \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  -v /var/lib/docker/volumes:/var/lib/docker/volumes \
  portainer/agent:2.18.4

Stop the running installation and update the container

docker stop portainer_agent
docker rm portainer_agent
docker pull portainer/agent:2.18.4

Now start portainer again.

Conclusion

Updating Portainer is easy and doesn’t cost much time. Already started containers stay up and have no downtime. Sweet!