Useful tools for docker container management

In this post I’m going to discuss three docker tools which I find really useful in my day to day workflow. These tools are,

• Dive
• Portainer
• dozzle

Dive: quick check of docker images

Dive is super useful to check if there any unnecessary data stored in a docker image. In Ubuntu to install dive run the following commands,

wget https://github.com/wagoodman/dive/releases/download/v0.9.2/dive_0.9.2_linux_amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./dive_0.9.2_linux_amd64.deb

Note, replace this 0.9.2 version to the latest one. Once this tool is installed in your system you can use,

dive <your-image-tag>

or

dive build -t <some-tag> .

You can use dive as GitHub action in your workflow. Checkout this action which helps integrating dive in your workflow using github action.

Dozzle: a light-weight centralized log monitoring tool for containers

This an useful tool which can be used for monitoring all the running containers live logs. This can be used with normal docker-compose or docker swarm.

dozzle:
  container_name: dozzle
  image: amir20/dozzle:latest
  volumes:
    - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
  ports:
    - "8001:8080"

If you add the above section in any of the existing docker-compose file this will work out of the box and will show all the running logs of the same docker compose file in localhost:8001.

Portainer: GUI to monitor all running container

This tool is good to see all the all docker containers in the system and meta data related to the docker containers.

Portainer 2.0 out of the box works with,

• docker
• docker-compose
• docker-swarm
• kubernetes
• azure container registry

Reference:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBNaOdNSsx8
• https://github.com/amir20/dozzle
• https://docs.portainer.io/