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!
1. 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
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
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:
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 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>
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>
Pretty cool, eh? Helps you understand your images and save disk space, who doesn't like that?
4. 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
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
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)
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.
I switched to Podman and haven't had any bad experiences.
Thank you for sharing:)
I've been using Podman since 2022 😄 Great one
Yeah Podman is also good, they should probably do a bit more marketing:)
Why not help them out and add podman to this list ;)
Haha, maybe next one:D I suggested orbstack because I personally used it
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"
I added podman as another alternative to the Orbstack section!
Orbstack is especially nice if you have <16gb of memory! Docker Desktop is crazy resource hungry
Good one! I shy away nowadays from using Docker desktop since it pretty reliably crashes my system 🫠
Have you gotten the chance to try Orbstack, Luke?
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.
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.
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 🐳
Docker Desktop needs 5GB of memory when idling on my laptop, I just think thats crazy. Unusable if you only have 8GB of memory
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.
I know how docker works, but how is this not a problem anyway? Will have to hceck out Colima!
+1 on Colima. Specially if you're on an ARM64 Mac.
Interesting, didn't know Colima before. Thanks for sharing!
Got ya! I've got M3 Macbook Pro with 16 GB memory and my next one will be definitely 32 GB! 🔥
Yea i'm also on a M2 Macbook Pro with 16 GB memory and I'm struggling lol, next one def. 32 GB :D
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...
Vercel is just a very expensive middle-man for AWS. Fine if you think that, most don’t.
To be fair, I'm not hiding that I am the co-founder. It's literally in the first sentence.
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.
Nice! I think I really need to give portainer another try:)
For
lazydocker, if you install it through Homebrew, you don't need to launch it with Docker as you imply, you can just runlazydockerin your terminalOh yeah, true! Will fix that, thank you:)
Sliplane is interesting, I will give it a try
Thank you:)
Great share! 👌
Thanks:)
Orbstack.dev is amazing tbh. And so much faster to start than Docker desktop!
Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.