Getting started

What Portiger is

Portiger is one binary you install on a bare Linux server. It installs Docker, sets itself up, and gives you a panel that runs your applications the way an orchestrator would: a wanted state that is put back when it drifts, rolling updates, health and readiness checks, secrets, domains and certificates, mail, backups and scheduled jobs. There is no Kubernetes underneath and nothing to assemble first.

Early access. Portiger is not on general sale yet. What is documented here is the product as it is being finished; for access, see portiger.com.

The Portiger dashboard: the machine's own figures, CPU, memory and disk rings, counts for stacks, containers, jobs and domains, a Sentinel card and a list of the components this installation runs. — The dashboard after installation: the machine, what is running on it, and what needs attention.

The shape of it

One process on one machine. The panel, the part that talks to Docker and the mail operator are packages inside the same binary, not services calling each other over a network. State lives in one directory on that machine, in SQLite files. Nothing about your installation is stored anywhere else.

Underneath, every stack is run as a service rather than a plain container. That is what buys the rolling update, the replica count, the automatic restart and the rollback. Portiger does that translation; you write ordinary Compose and never see the machinery.

The words this panel uses

node

A machine in the workload pool. The machine Portiger is installed on is a node and is counted as one.

workload pool

The nodes that can be given work. Its engine is named only on the System components page.

namespace

A wall between two sets of work on the same installation. Stacks, secrets, configs and placement live inside one. The default one is called default.

stack

An application, deployed from Git, defined by hand, adopted from something already running, or one of Portiger's own. See Stacks.

job

A command Portiger runs for you, once, on demand or on a schedule.

domain

A name you own, as an object: DNS points it here, the web side answers it, a certificate covers it, and mail for it can live here too.

secret

A value kept encrypted and injected at deploy time. Either global to a namespace or owned by one stack.

Sentinel

The security check that reads this host - its ports, its SSH configuration, its pending updates - and nothing else.

Assistant

The chat surface: questions about the panel, and installing an application by describing it. Max only.

System components

The one page that names the software Portiger runs on: the engine, the workload pool, publishing, mail, Sentinel, the Assistant link and the privileged helper.

What it manages

Area	What you get
Workloads	Stacks with per-service container squares, health and readiness probes, containers with logs and a console, jobs, images, volumes and networks.
Networking	Domains with DNS, publishing rules and certificates, DNS providers and a zone editor.
Delivery	Git providers, pipelines and registered runners; a stack created from a repository writes its own CI file.
Mail	A mail server for your own domains, with mailboxes, forwarders, lists, a queue and an acceptance test.
Security	Secrets, configs, SSO, an mTLS mesh and Sentinel.
Monitoring	Request and resource metrics, an activity history, and notification channels.
Operations	Nodes and placement, encrypted backups, system components, disk cleanup, licence and users.

What it deliberately is not

Not Kubernetes, and not a Kubernetes manager. Portiger runs Docker workloads on machines you own.
Not a SaaS. The panel, its database and your history live on your machine. The one outbound relationship is the licence check.
Not offline. Version 1 has no air-gapped or offline licence: a key is checked at install and kept current afterwards.
Not everywhere yet. Version 1 ships Debian and Ubuntu deb packages. rpm and arm64 follow in 1.1.

Next: install it, then the setup wizard.