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Portracker

Portracker is a self-hosted, real-time port monitoring and discovery tool.

Description

It provides a dashboard to monitor active ports on your network and discover new services. It integrates well with TrueNAS and Docker to display native apps, virtual machines, and containers.

When to use it

  • When you want to monitor open ports on your network in real-time.
  • To discover new services running in Docker containers or on TrueNAS.
  • To avoid port conflicts by having a clear map of assigned ports.

When not to use it

  • For deep packet inspection or security auditing (use specialized tools like Suricata or Snort).
  • If you only need a one-time port scan (use nmap).

Getting started

Docker Compose

The easiest way to deploy Portracker is via Docker Compose:

services:
  portracker:
    image: mostafawahied/portracker:latest
    container_name: portracker
    ports:
      - "3050:3050"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
      - ./data:/app/data
    restart: always

Access the dashboard at http://localhost:3050.

CLI examples

You can interact with the Portracker container using Docker commands:

# View real-time logs of discovered services
docker logs -f portracker

# Check the version of Portracker
docker exec portracker ./portracker --version

API examples

Portracker provides a simple health check and status API:

# Check service health
curl http://localhost:3050/health

Alternatives

Backlog

  • Set up alerts for unexpected port changes.

Contribution Metadata

  • Confidence: high
  • Last reviewed: 2026-03-01

Sources / References

  • https://github.com/mostafa-wahied/portracker
  • https://nmap.org/
  • https://www.netdata.cloud/