Are you still monitoring your containers in tons of console windows or passionate about knowing dozens of terminal commands? There are a couple of nice Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) for Docker, that can make your life much simpler and increase your performance. Let’s select which one will suit you best.
Containers, its an abstraction at the app layer that packages code and dependencies together. Multiple containers can run on the same machine and share the OS kernel with other containers, each running as isolated processes in userspace. Containers take up less space than VMs (container images are typically tens of MBs in size), and start almost instantly.
A container image is a lightweight, stand-alone, executable package of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, settings.
Containers run apps natively on the host machine’s kernel. They have better performance characteristics than virtual machines that only get virtual access to host resources through a hypervisor. Containers can get native access, each one running in a discrete process, taking no more memory than any other executable.
Docker as we know, is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications, whether on laptops, data center VMs, or the cloud. Docker provides an API for interacting with the Docker daemon (called the Docker Engine API).
The Docker API has allowed limitless options for interfacing with Docker engine, containers, and images to emerge from CLIs to desktop applications and web-based management tools. Everything the Docker client can do can be done with the API. Below GUI tools extensively uses API to interface with the Docker engine.
Docker Desktop Dashboard has been introduced in the latest release of Docker Desktop. It provides a simple interface that enables you to interact with containers and applications and manage the lifecycle of your applications directly from your machine.
The Docker Desktop Dashboard offers the following :
- A GUI to abstract core information from the CLI
- Access to container logs directly in the UI to search and explore container behavior
- Access to combined Compose logs from the UI to understand Compose applications
- Quick visibility into ports being used by containers
- Monitor container resource utilization
Kitematic
Kitematic is a simple application for managing Docker containers on Mac, Linux, and Windows. It is an open-source project built to simplify and streamline using Docker on a Mac or Windows PC. Kitematic automates the Docker installation and setup process and provides an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) for running Docker containers. Kitematic integrates with Docker Machine to provision a VirtualBox VM and install the Docker Engine locally on your machine.
Kitematic console
Some of the key advantages are
- Fast and Easy Setup – one-click install gets Docker running and lets you control your app containers from a graphical user interface (GUI)
- Easily search and pull your favorite images on Docker Hub.
- Seamlessly switch between Kitematic GUI or Docker CLI to run and manage your application containers.
- Automatically map ports, visually change environment variables, configuring volumes, streamline logs, and CLI access to containers.
Download :
You can download and install Kitematic in one of the following ways:- Choose Kitematic from the Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows menu to get started with the Kitematic install.
- Install Docker Toolbox (on older systems that do not meet the requirements of Docker for Mac or Docker for Windows).
- Download Kitematic directly from the Kitematic releases page.
Documentation :
Kitematic’s documentation can be found here.Portainer (Web app)
Open-source (Zlib license).ОS: Linux, Mac OS X, Windows.
Portainer has full support for the following Docker versions:
- Docker 1.10 to the latest version
- Standalone Docker Swarm >= 1.2.3 (NOTE: Use of Standalone Docker Swarm is being discouraged since the introduction of built-in Swarm Mode in Docker. While older versions of Portainer had support for Standalone Docker Swarm, Portainer 1.17.0 and newer do not support it. However, the built-in Swarm Mode of Docker is fully supported.)
- Docker 1.9
Portainer can be easily installed with Docker on a standalone Linux/Windows server/swarm cluster. A full-featured platform allows you to work with different endpoints.
You can manage registries, networks, volumes, secrets, images, and containers. You are also able to save your configuration (you can find examples of alertmanager and Prometheus at the live demo), and configure a Docker Swarm and stacks. Portainer can check if the container is healthy.
Apart from the basic operations you need to work with containers like run, stop, resume, kill, remove, etc., you can also inspect containers, see logs, visualize basic stats, attach and open the console for certain containers.
As a plus, you also get a role-based access system and the ability to install extensions.
Conclusion: a powerful GUI instrument that can be used for a team project with local or remote containers, Docker stack or Docker Swarm. However, Portainer may turn out to be too much for your generic needs. The interface may also be inconvenient especially if you use many projects at the same time.
DockStation (Desktop app)
OS: Linux/Mac/Windows
DockStation is a free full-featured desktop app which allows you to work with
docker and docker-compose. It can help generate a clean and native docker-compose.yml file which can be used even outside the application, using the native Docker Compose CLI commands. It also helps you to manage your containers and services (both remote and local), and monitor them (logs monitoring, searching logs, grouping, running tools and getting container info). There are additional tools available for common, multiple and single monitoring of container resources.With DockStation, you can easily track CPU, Memory, Networks I/O, Blocks I/O usage and open ports. All work can be organized into projects, where you can check the status of each container, build a graphical scheme that visualizes each image in the project and relations between them. As an additional takeaway, DockStation works like charm with Docker Hub.
Docker Desktop (Desktop app)
Since Docker-toolbox (with Kitematic) is deprecated, all users are recommended to use Docker Desktop for Mac and Docker Desktop for Windows.
This tool gives you the ability to set resource limits for your Docker (memory, CPU, swap and disk image size, file sharing, proxies, and network), configure Docker engine, command line and Kubernetes (you can configure deployment to a Kubernetes from Docker Desktop).
Using dashboard, you can use not only basic container operations, but can also see logs, basic stats and inspect your container. All of this can be called through the contextual menu or from the indicator in the status bar.
Lazydocker (Terminal UI)
Open-sourceOS: (Linux/OSX/Windows)
Requirements:
- Go version >= 1.8
- Docker >= 1.13 (API >= 1.25)
- Docker-Compose >= 1.23.2 (optional)
Lazydocker can be used through both mouse and keyboard. For some elements, the contextual menu is available, where you can find all popular commands with shortcuts. The good news is that you not only have basic commands to manipulate containers, basic stats, logs, and inspections; you can use also graphical visualization of main metrics (by default CPU and memory usage) and ‘top’ of processes. Additionally you can also configure this section for almost all the metrics you want.
For the selected images, you can see commands from the Dockerfile that are executed when they run, and the inherited layers. Cleaning of unused containers, images, volumes (prune) is also provided, apart from the liberty of modifying available commands and adding new ones.
As a result, we have a minimalistic terminal interface that can be really helpful with several ‘not so complicated’ projects.
Docui (Terminal UI)
OS: Mac/LinuxRequirements:
- Go >= 1.11.4~
- Docker Engine >= 18.06.1
- Git
This console UI is made for convenient creation and configuration of new containers/services, where you can find a lot of keybindings for all necessary operations.
You can work with:
- Images (search/pull/remove, save/import/load, inspect/filter)
- Containers (create/remove, start/stop, export/commit, inspect/rename/filter, exec cmd)
- Volumes (create/remove, inspect/filter)
- Networks (remove, inspect/filter)
Docker Compose UI
Docker Compose UI is a web interface for Docker Compose.Its minimal HTTP API on top of Docker Compose while maintaining full interoperability with Docker Compose CLI.The application can be deployed as a single container, there are no dependencies nor databases to install.
Docker compose UI is simple, run the below command and wait while Docker pulls the container from the Docker Hub.
docker run \
--name docker-compose-ui \
-p 5000:5000 \
-w /opt/docker-compose-projects/ \
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
francescou/docker-compose-ui:1.10.0http://localhost:5000Download & Documentation :
Docker compose UI documentation can be found here.Rancher
Rancher is an open-source software platform that enables organizations to run and manage Docker and Kubernetes in production. With Rancher, organizations no longer have to build a container services platform from scratch using a distinct set of open source technologies. Rancher supplies the entire software stack needed to manage containers in production.Rancher software consists of four major components:
- Infrastructure Orchestration
- Container Orchestration & Scheduling
- Application Catalog
- Enterprise-Grade control
Start the Rancher container using the following
docker run command:sudo docker run -d --restart=unless-stopped -p 8080:8080 rancher/server:stableRancher offers similar features to other web-based GUIs but offers interface elements to add the extra features that Rancher offers. For example, to change the number of WordPress instances, click the plus or minus icons on the container page. The normal resource constraints apply for scaling container instances, e.g. you can’t have more than one container running on a Docker host that uses the same port as another.
Note – Rancher version 1.6 was a container management platform built on Docker but whereas Rancher 2.x builds on Kubernetes.
Conclusion
The above is not a full list but some of the most popular and convenient free GUIs for Docker. Which one to select — depends on your needs. If you need a really powerful instrument for a team with access management, works with Docker swarm, with Docker stack and can be deployed on a remote server — choose Portainer. If you require a powerful instrument, that works on several projects (possibly remote) withdocker-compose and prefer a local desktop app - choose DockStation.