Portainer not connected to network after reboot ...

[drnicolas]

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I am not veriy experienced with portainer .
Currently, I am running portainer and 2 instances of paperless under portainer with stacks.

in principle this works fine.
But after a reboot I have always the problem that ....

1. portainer is running, but not connected to a network and not reachable via 9443.

2. CHatGPT recommends to remove the portainer-conatiner and start it manually with a complicated docker run command.

3. This solves the problem until I do a reboot

4. After the machine reboot (and fixing portainer) both paperless instances are stuck in STARTING.

5. the reason seems that they are not connected to a network, which I can do manually

6. thereafter everything is fine, until the next machine reboot

7. It seems not to be fatal to do a simple docker restart

Can someone help me?

[Nick-Portainer]

From what you’ve described, this looks more like Docker startup behaviour after a reboot rather than a Portainer issue.

When Docker starts, it does not really honour service dependencies from Compose in the same way as docker compose up. So Paperless may be starting before Postgres or Redis are ready, which can leave it stuck in a starting state.

I would check that each service has:

restart: unless-stopped

Also make sure Postgres and Redis have proper health checks, and that Paperless uses depends_on with condition: service_healthy. Increasing the Paperless health check start_period to around 90 seconds may also help.

For Portainer, I would avoid recreating it manually each time. Deploy it once using the official install method, then leave the container in place:

https://docs.portainer.io/start/install-ce/server/docker/linux

Could you share:

1. How Portainer was originally deployed, including the docker run command or Compose file.
2. Your OS and Docker version.
3. The Compose/stack YAML for one Paperless instance.

That should help confirm whether this is mainly a container startup order issue, a Portainer deployment issue, or both.