The road to Portainer

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.

The 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 the majority of the code has already been updated or rewritten, and by mid-2017, new features were added, such as role-based controls and Docker Compose support.

In December 2016, a...