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Jonas Scholz
Jonas Scholz Subscriber

Posted on • Edited on • Originally published at sliplane.io

5 Awesome Docker Tools To Make Your Life Easier

Hey there! 👋 Working with Docker can sometimes be a pain, but these are some tools that make it so much easier. I've tried dozens of Docker tools over the years, and these five have become my absolute favorites (slightly biased!). Whether you're debugging containers, managing images or deploying, there's something here that'll save you time :)

Let's get it!

Docker

1. Lazy Docker

Lazy Docker

Lazy Docker is a terminal UI for Docker and Docker Compose that makes managing containers a breeze. Instead of having to remember and type out long Docker commands, you get an interactive interface where everything is just a keypress away.

Some of the key features include:

  • View container status, logs, and metrics at a glance
  • Restart/remove/rebuild containers with a single keypress
  • Monitor resource usage with ASCII graphs
  • Attach to container shells easily
  • Prune unused containers, images and volumes
  • Full mouse support for clicking and scrolling

Getting started is super simple. On Mac you can install it with:

brew install lazydocker
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And then you can just run lazydocker container to start it.

docker run --rm -it -v \
/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
-v /yourpath:/.config/jesseduffield/lazydocker \
lazyteam/lazydocker
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Don't forget to replace /yourpath with the path to your home directory.

Bonus: Your friends will think you're a wizard when you exclusively use the terminal and not docker desktop 😎

2. Sliplane

Sliplane is a hosting platform that makes deploying Docker containers super simple. While it's not exactly a "tool" in the traditional sense, it's become the go-to solution for many companies deploying Docker containers (full disclosure: I'm a co-founder!).

The main features that make it awesome for Docker deployments:

  • Push-to-deploy from GitHub or Docker Hub
  • Zero-downtime deployments
  • Automatic health checks and notifications
  • Built-in logging and monitoring
  • Pay-per-server model (host unlimited containers on one server)

What I particularly like is that you don't need any DevOps knowledge - if your app works in a container locally, it'll work in production. Just connect your GitHub repo or point to a Docker Hub image, and you're good to go.

The pricing is also pretty straightforward - you pay for the server (starting at 7€/month) and can host as many containers as you want on it. Perfect for when you have multiple small projects or need development environments.

Here's what the deployment process looks like:

Astro

You can try it out for free for 2 days to see if it fits your needs!
Deploy Docker Apps in 2 Minutes 🚀

3. Dive

Dive

Dive is an incredible tool for exploring and analyzing Docker images layer by layer. It shows you exactly what files changed in each layer and helps identify ways to shrink your images by highlighting duplicated files and wasted space. The interactive UI lets you browse the complete filesystem tree while indicating what was added, modified or removed in each layer. Getting started is super simple - just run:

dive <your-image-tag>
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And you'll get a nice interactive UI to explore your image, as shown in the gif above.

You can also create an alias and run it in a Docker container itself, so you can use it without having to install it on your machine.

alias dive="docker run -ti --rm  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock wagoodman/dive"
dive <your-image-tag>
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Pretty cool, eh? Helps you understand your images and save disk space, who doesn't like that?

4. Orbstack

Orbstack

Orbstack is a Docker desktop alternative that I've been using for a while now. In my opinion the main selling point is that it's a native app for macOS and doesn't rely on Docker Machine to create VMs, meaning that its a lot faster and less resource intensive. It is still very new, so there are some rough edges, but I think it's worth a shot. I think its only supported on macOS at the moment, so that might be a problem for some of you 😔

PS: Orbstack is not the only Docker Desktop alternative! There are plenty of others (like podman.io with similar benefits and also Linux/Windows support. Thanks @jordantrizz for the suggestion:)

5. Watchtower

Watchtower

I've written about Watchtower a few times already, and it's still one of my favorite tools. It's a simple tool that will watch your Docker images and automatically update them to the latest version. It's super easy to set up and just works. This is very useful for your homelab or so, not so much for production.

You can try it out with the following command:

docker run -d \
  --name watchtower \
  -e REPO_USER=username \
  -e REPO_PASS=password \
  -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
  containrrr/watchtower container_to_watch --debug
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Try it out, you won't regret it!

Conclusion

I hope you found this list helpful! If you have any other suggestions, please let me know in the comments below.

Cheers,

Jonas (Co-Founder of Sliplane)

Top comments (45)

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douglasfugazi profile image
Douglas Fugazi

Everyone is missing Podman, the best free & open source container tools: podman.io
it works on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
To me, it is a game-changing.

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valdineisantos profile image
Valdinei dos Santos

I switched to Podman and haven't had any bad experiences.

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Thank you for sharing:)

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pierre profile image
Pierre-Henry Soria ✨

I've been using Podman since 2022 😄 Great one

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Yeah Podman is also good, they should probably do a bit more marketing:)

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jordantrizz profile image
Jordan

Why not help them out and add podman to this list ;)

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Haha, maybe next one:D I suggested orbstack because I personally used it

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jordantrizz profile image
Jordan

You can always add a section called "Other", missed better-docker-ps

github.com/Mikescher/better-docker-ps

Unless this was just to get the word out on sliplane, any thoughts on bring your own server in the future?

PS. Your blog sliplane.io/blog/5-awesome-docker-... has "invalid date"

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

I added podman as another alternative to the Orbstack section!

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thecodingthesi profile image
Thesi

Orbstack is especially nice if you have <16gb of memory! Docker Desktop is crazy resource hungry

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wimadev profile image
Lukas Mauser

Good one! I shy away nowadays from using Docker desktop since it pretty reliably crashes my system 🫠

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pierre profile image
Pierre-Henry Soria ✨

Have you gotten the chance to try Orbstack, Luke?

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kasir-barati profile image
Mohammad Jawad (Kasir) Barati

Raising one concern. With all these toolings I am afraid we might loss touch with the real basic skill which containers and their native language. Like SQL, with all those ORMs I lost touch with it. And now I am trying to get back to where I was. Just food for thoughts.

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Mostly agree, I think everybody should at least try to deploy something without a PaaS once. I don't agree in regards to OrbStack, Dive etc.

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sfritsch09 profile image
Sebastian Fritsch

What's the problem with Docker Desktop? The last features are amazing, in Builds you have a lot of insights about your build docker image and see all logs, cache, status, build time and more 🐳

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Docker Desktop needs 5GB of memory when idling on my laptop, I just think thats crazy. Unusable if you only have 8GB of memory
Memory Usage

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amavlyanov profile image
Andrey Mavlyanov • Edited

actually it's fine since most of the memory here is a vm running gnu/linux distribution. cause 'docker' (read: containers is a capability of a Linux Kernel). you can not run 'docker' on a win or mac without running linux machine somewhere (this could be you lap or you lab machine, but somewhere you need to run linux kernel and related stuff. that's the basics).

the problem with docker desktop is a licence, not the amount of resource it uses.

btw, I don't actually use docker desktop on my Mac, prefer Colima, but I suppose there might be some setting to lower the memory usage of a GNU/Linux machine running under the hood of the docker desktop.

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

I know how docker works, but how is this not a problem anyway? Will have to hceck out Colima!

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octogrimm profile image
Octo

+1 on Colima. Specially if you're on an ARM64 Mac.

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Interesting, didn't know Colima before. Thanks for sharing!

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sfritsch09 profile image
Sebastian Fritsch

Got ya! I've got M3 Macbook Pro with 16 GB memory and my next one will be definitely 32 GB! 🔥

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Yea i'm also on a M2 Macbook Pro with 16 GB memory and I'm struggling lol, next one def. 32 GB :D

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shroomlife profile image
shroomlife 🍄 • Edited

Sliplane is just a very expensive middle-man for hetzner.de cloud servers. Ah I see the author is also from there. This is a hidden commercial...

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Vercel is just a very expensive middle-man for AWS. Fine if you think that, most don’t.

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

To be fair, I'm not hiding that I am the co-founder. It's literally in the first sentence.

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noreuzis profile image
noreuzis • Edited

I'm using the community edition of Portainer, and it's been seamless so far! If you're short on time and not focused on DevOps tasks/area, it's very helpful.

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Nice! I think I really need to give portainer another try:)

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axiol profile image
Arnaud Delante

For lazydocker, if you install it through Homebrew, you don't need to launch it with Docker as you imply, you can just run lazydocker in your terminal

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Oh yeah, true! Will fix that, thank you:)

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raptor78455 profile image
Antoine Raymond

Sliplane is interesting, I will give it a try

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Thank you:)

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pierre profile image
Pierre-Henry Soria ✨

Great share! 👌

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code42cate profile image
Jonas Scholz

Thanks:)

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pierre profile image
Pierre-Henry Soria ✨

Orbstack.dev is amazing tbh. And so much faster to start than Docker desktop!

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