Add a new Edge Stack

From the menu select Edge Stacks then click Add stack.

Give the stack a descriptive name then select one or more Edge Groups.

In Deployment type, select the type of deployment you are performing.

This may be auto-selected by your choice of Edge Groups.

In the Build Method, define how to deploy your app from one of the following options:

Option	Overview
Web editor	Use the Portainer web editor to write or paste in your build file.
Upload	Upload a build file from your computer.
Repository	Use a GitHub repo where the build file is stored.
Template	Use an Edge stack template. Only available for the Compose deployment type.

Web editor

Use the web editor to define the services for your deployment.

You can search within the web editor at any time by pressing Ctrl-F (or Cmd-F on Mac).

Upload

Click Select a file to upload a file from your computer containing your stack definition.

Repository

Enter the information about your Git repository to deploy your Edge Stack from Git.

Portainer's Git deployment functionality does not currently support the use of Git submodules. If your repository includes submodules, they will not be pulled as part of the deployment. We hope to add support for submodules in a future release.

Field/Option	Overview
Authentication	Toggle this on if your Git repository requires authentication.
Git Credentials	If the Authentication toggle is enabled and you have configured Git credentials, you can select them from this dropdown.
Username	Enter your Git username.
Personal Access Token	Enter your personal access token or password.
Save credential	Check this option to save the credentials entered above for future use under the name provided in the credential name field.

If you have 2FA configured in GitHub, your passcode is your password.

Field/Option	Overview
Repository URL	Enter the repository URL. If you have enabled Authentication above the credentials will be used to access the repository. The below options will be populated by what is found in the repository.
Repository reference	Select the reference to use when deploying the stack (for example, the branch).
Compose path / manifest path	Enter the path to the Compose or manifest file from the root of the repository.
Additional paths	Click Add file to add additional files to be parsed by the build (for example, an environment-specific compose or manifest file).
GitOps updates	Toggle this on to enable GitOps updates (see below).
Skip TLS verification	Toggle this on to skip the verification of TLS certificates used by your repository. This is useful if your repo uses a self-signed certificate.

GitOps updates

Portainer supports automatically updating your Edge Stacks deployed from Git repositories. To enable this, toggle on GitOps updates and configure your settings.

For more detail on how automatic updates function under the hood, have a look at this knowledge base article.

Field/Option	Overview
Mechanism	Select the method to use when checking for updates:
	Polling: Periodically poll the Git repository from Portainer to check for updates to the repository. Webhook: Generate a webhook URL to add to your Git repository to trigger the update on demand (for example via GitHub actions).
Fetch interval	If Polling is selected, how often Portainer will check the Git repository for updates.
Webhook	When Webhook is selected, displays the webhook URL to use in your integration. Click Copy link to copy the webhook URL to the clipboard.

GitOps updates when using polling

GitOps updates when using webhooks

Re-pull image

When Webhook is selected, displays the webhook URL to use in your integration. Click Copy link to copy the webhook URL to the clipboard.

Force redeployment

Enable this setting to force the redeployment of your stack at the specified interval (or when the webhook is triggered), overwriting any changes that have been made in the local environment, even if there has been no update to the stack in Git. This is useful if you want to ensure that your Git repository is the source of truth for your stacks and are happy with the local stack being replaced. If this option is left disabled, automatic updates will only trigger if Portainer detects a change in the remote Git repository.

Relative path volumes

When you toggle Enable relative path volumes to on, you are able to specify relative path references in your compose files. Portainer will create the required directory structure and populate the directories with the relevant files from your Git repository.

This feature is only available for Docker Standalone and Docker Swarm environments.

On Docker Standalone environments, specify the path at which you want your files to be created on your host filesystem in the Local filesystem path field.

Ensure this directory exists on your local filesystem and is writable.

On Docker Swarm environments, specify the path at which you want your files to be created in the Network filesystem path field.

Ensure that this path is available on all of your Docker Swarm nodes and is writable.

For more detail on how this feature works, have a look at this article.

GitOps Edge configurations

When relative path volumes are enabled, you can also choose to deploy device-specific configurations from your Git repository to the devices your Edge stack will be deployed to. To use this, enable the GitOps Edge configurations toggle, enter the Directory (relative to the root of your Git repository) and select the Matching rule that corresponds to your configuration.

Within your Git repository at the Directory you define, you should have file names or folder names (depending on your Matching rule selection) that correspond to the Portainer Edge IDs for the devices you will be deploying the stack to. You can reference this ID in your stack files with the PORTAINER_EDGE_ID environment variable.

You can find the Edge IDs for your Edge environments under Environments, select the environment, and note the Edge identifier value in the Edge information box. It will look like the following:

73149964-56f4-473b-81b3-5ecdc397e490

For example, when using folder name matching and a directory of config , you can use the following syntax:

version: '3'

services:
  myservice:
    image: myimage:latest
    volumes:
      - ./config/${PORTAINER_EDGE_ID}:/my-device-config

In this example, each Edge device the stack was deployed to would mount their specific device (based on the Portainer Edge ID) folder from within the config directory of the Git repository to the /my-device-config folder in the container.

If you deploy your stack to a device that does not have a file or folder with the corresponding Portainer Edge ID in the GitOps Edge configuration directory, the stack will deploy as normal but with no device specific configuration deployed.

Template

Select an Edge Stack template to deploy from the Template dropdown, and make any configuration adjustments as required.

Additional settings

Webhooks

For the Web editor, Upload and Template build methods you can choose to enable an Edge Stack webhook. This webhook will allow you to trigger updates to the stack by sending a POST request to a specific URL, instructing Portainer to pull the most up to date version of the associated image and re-deploy the stack.

For Git deployed stacks, this functionality is available via GitOps updates.

Environment variables

As an optional step, you can also set environment variables. You can use these to define values in your compose file that would vary between deployments (for example, hostnames, database names, etc).

This feature is only available on Docker Standalone and Docker Swarm environments.

Environment variables can be set individually within Portainer or you can use Load variables from .env file to upload a file containing your environment variables. Environment variables you define (either individually or via a .env file) will be available to use in your compose file using an environment definition:

environment:
  MY_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE: ${MY_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE}

Alternatively, you can add stack.env as an env_file definition to add all the environment variables that you have defined individually as well as those included in an uploaded .env file:

env_file:
  - stack.env

Note the compose file is not changed when environment variables are used - this allows variables to be updated within Portainer without editing the compose file itself which would take it out of sync with the Git repository. You will still see the ${MY_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLE} style entry in the compose file.

Registry

If your stack requires access to images in private registries, you can specify which registry to use as part of the deployment.

Pre-pull images

By default, Docker will start containers within the stack that it already has images for, while at the same time pulling any other images it needs from the upstream registries. In some cases you may want to wait until all of the needed images are pulled to the device before starting the stack. To do this, enable the Pre-pull images toggle. This can also help to avoid issues when some images in a stack are unable to be pulled, leading to an incomplete or partial deployment.

Retry deployment

If a deployment of an Edge Stack fails (for example if the remote Edge environment is unavailable), by default Portainer will not try and redeploy the stack. If you wish to enable retrying of failed deployments, you can toggle Retry deployment to on.

When Retry deployment is enabled for an Edge Stack and the deployment of the Edge Stack fails, Portainer will:

1. Retry the deployment every 10 seconds for the first hour.

2. After the first hour, retry once an hour for 7 days.

3. After 7 days, Portainer will stop retrying and the Edge Stack will be given a "failed" status.

Update configurations

This section lets you define the method in which your stack updates are deployed across your Edge devices. You can choose to deploy to All edge devices at once, or select Parallel edge device(s) to specify how many devices to update concurrently.

These settings do not apply to the initial provision of your Edge Stack. These only apply to the process that will occur when your stack is updated after deployment.

If Parallel edge device(s) is selected, you can choose to either deploy in static group sizes or in an exponential rollout strategy. For static group sizes, choose the Number of device(s) option and specify your group size.

For an exponential rollout, choose the Exponential rollout option and specify how many devices to start with, then select the multiplier to apply to the initial size. For example, selecting a start size of 5 and a multiplier of 2, stack updates would be rolled out to 5 devices, then 10 (5 x 2), then 20 (10 x 2), and so forth.

When using parallel rollouts, you can also specify the Timeout (in minutes) before Portainer considers the update to have failed, as well as the Update delay (in minutes) between each group of updates are applied.

In addition, you can define the Update failure action that will be taken if the update fails:

• Continue will move on to the next group of devices to update.

• Pause will halt the update process but will keep the update applied to any devices that have already been deployed to.

• Rollback will halt the update process and roll back the update on devices already updated.

Once the configuration is completed, click Deploy the stack.