Installing Perses in a container

This section is explaining how you can install Perses using a container manager like Podman or Docker.

It assumes you have already installed and are familiar with either the Podman or the Docker commandline tooling.

Running container image#

Start the Perses container image using one of the following commands depending on your tooling choice:

# podman command.
#
$ podman run --name perses -d -p 127.0.0.1:8080:8080 persesdev/perses

# docker command.
#
$ docker run --name perses -d -p 127.0.0.1:8080:8080 persesdev/perses

The details in this command are that we give the container a referencable name (–name perses), detach the container from the command line (-d), map the local machine port 8080 to the container port 8080 (-p 127.0.0.1:8080:8080), and use the image version supported in these instructions (latest). Note: you can use any local port you have available, but you need to map to container port 8080.

Tags#

We are publishing a set of tags to match different requirements when running Perses in a container:

1. Our images can run either on arm64 or on amd64 platform.
2. We have two different types of image: distroless and distroless-debug. The first one is meant to be used in production as it doesn’t contain anything excepting the Perses binaries. The second one contains a shell and should be used to debug any issue you might encounter with your container.
3. The tag latest is an alias for the distroless distribution and is erased with the latest release.
4. The tag latest-debug is an alias for the distroless-debug distribution and is erased with the latest release.
5. We are also providing an image for each commit created on the main branch. The tag created for each commit is following this pattern: main-<YYYY-MM-DD>-<short commit ID>-<distribution>

Examples:

• images built from the main branch: persesdev/perses:main-2023-12-14-f66e10ce-distroless-debug or persesdev/perses:main-2023-12-14-f66e10ce-distroless
• latest Perses image: persesdev/perses or persesdev/perses:latest-debug
• precise release image: persesdev/perses:v0.42.1, persesdev/perses:v0.42.1-debug, persesdev/perses:v0.42.1-distroless, persesdev/perses:v0.42.1-distroless-debug
• minor release image: persesdev/perses:v0.42, persesdev/perses:v0.42-debug, persesdev/perses:v0.42-distroless, persesdev/perses:v0.42-distroless-debug

Connect a browser (default)#

Open the Perses UI at http://localhost:8080.

You are presented with the home page, in light mode. For fun, you can optionally flip the switch in the top right corner to enable dark mode.

What’s next?#

In the next section, you start exploring Perses and the available tooling.