Rui CarmoThe new hotness in the Linux container space (because nobody remembers LXC anymore).
Resources
| Category | Date | Link | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base Images | 2015 | gliderlabs/alpine | A minimal Alpine Linux base image |
| phusion/baseimage-docker | an arguably sane Ubuntu base image | ||
| CLI | 2015 | codekitchen/dinghy | a nice wrapper that sets up a host NFS server and other niceties |
| Wharfee | a nice CLI wrapper | ||
| 2014 | dockersh | Segregate logged in users into different containers | |
| Distros | 2013 | Core OS | a lightweight distro focused on containers, since acquired by RedHat |
| GUI | 2026 | Dockge | a self-hosted, stack-oriented Docker Compose manager with a reactive UI |
| 2025 | Arcane | A Portainer alternative | |
| 2016 | Portainer | a simple NodeJS Web UI | |
| 2015 | Portus | A registry front-end that works with the v2 registry and has some user management features. | |
| 2014 | Seagull | A Web UI for container management | |
| Mac Alternatives | 2026 | Davit | a native macOS UI for Apple platform containers |
| 2021 | podman-macos | a menubar item to manage podman machine, which is in turn available on Homebrew | |
| lima | a possible replacement for Docker Desktop on Mac | ||
| 2019 | boot2docker-xhyve | a clean way to run Docker inside Hypervisor.framework | |
| Network | 2018 | pipework | map physical interfaces to specific containers |
| 2015 | socketplane | Auto-discovery and OVS for inter-host traffic | |
| 2014 | weave | inter-host tunneling, with encryption | |
| OCI Tools | 2019 | docker-slim | performs simple runtime analysis to remove unnecessary libraries and slim down images |
| 2018 | buildah | a CLI tool for builting OCI container images from | |
| Orchestration | 2015 | Kubernetes | The current industry favorite |
| Rancher | Still arguably one of the nicer options in 2018 | ||
| Other runtimes | 2025 | container | Apple’s own container host, with a Docker-like interface |
| 2022 | nerdctl | can be used to manage containers in containerd/k3s | |
| 2019 | podman | aims for 1:1 CLI parity (see also Buildah and Skopeo) | |
| 2018 | Singularity | a different take on containers, not quite OCI compliant | |
| PaaS | 2026 | Cloud in a Bottle | self-hosted app platform that deploys web apps from Git repositories using manifests and rootless Podman |
| 2020 | CapRover | a nice web front-end for Docker Swarm | |
| Tools | 2026 | Z-Jail | lightweight Linux sandbox combining namespaces, pivot_root, seccomp-bpf, capability dropping, and verdict auditing |
| maintenant | Single-container monitoring stack — auto-discovers Docker services, built-in dashboards, alerts, uptime checks, no config needed | ||
| 2025 | Container-Compose | docker compose for Apple’s container engine | |
| tart | a macOS VM manager targeting CI/CD applications | ||
| Diun | A tool to monitor Docker images and notify when updates are available | ||
| tini | a tiny init system for Docker containers, to handle zombie processes and reaping | ||
| uncloud | a lightweight clustering and container orchestration tool | ||
| unregistry | a tool for directly copying images between servers without a registry. | ||
| tilt | a tool for managing local development environments, with a focus on Kubernetes and Docker | ||
| 2024 | lazydocker | a nice TUI for Docker management, with usage charts and easy stack/compose viewing (Portainer for terminals) | |
| 2023 | distrobox | a nice wrapper for sandbox management | |
| colima | a macOS VM container manager that replaces Docker desktop and works well with |
Setting up boot2docker manually on Parallels
Since I don’t have Parallels Pro, I run Docker on my older Macs like this:
- Download a recent release and put the ISO someplace safe
- Create a new VM manually by dragging the ISO to Parallels (use the
SharedorNATnetwork type) - After first boot, use
fdiskto create a primary partition in/dev/sdaand format it usingmkfs.ext4 -L boot2docker-data /dev/sda1 - Reboot so that it gets mounted and used for certificate storage
- Do
brew install docker(which gets you the CLI) - Set up port forwarding for port 2376 and a local port to the VM’s SSH port
- SSH into the VM (
docker/tcuser) and copy the*.pemfiles from/var/lib/boot2docker/tlsto your~/.dockerfolder - Set and export
DOCKER_HOSTandDOCKER_TLS_VERIFYaccordingly:
export DOCKER_HOST=localhost:2376
export DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY=1
Useful Dockerfile Snippets
| Base Image | Description | Dockerfile snippet |
|---|---|---|
| Ubuntu | Installing the Oracle JDK (and setting the EULA) | RUN echo oracle-java8-installer shared/accepted-oracle-license-v1-1 select true | debconf-set-selections \ && add-apt-repository -y ppa:webupd8team/java \ && apt-get install -y java-common oracle-java8-installer oracle-java8-set-default \ && rm -rf /var/cache/oracle-jdk8-installer |
Building The Docker Registry From Scratch (on ARM, too!)
Very simple, really, once you have Go installed. Quite quick on a Raspberry Pi 2, too:
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$PATH
# this fetches godep and golint
go get github.com/tools/godep github.com/golang/lint/golint
# this fetches and builds the registry
go get github.com/docker/distribution/cmd/registry
# test it with the default config
$GOPATH/bin/registry $GOPATH/src/github.com/docker/distribution/cmd/registry/config.yml
Restarting a Container Automatically in Docker Compose
Since watchtower only does updates and not restarts (which seems like a missed opportunity), this simple snippet will restart a container at a specific time every day:
version: "3"
services:
myservice:
container_name: myservice
restarter:
image: docker:cli
restart: unless-stopped
volumes: ["/var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock"]
entrypoint: ["/bin/sh","-c"]
command:
- |
while true; do
current_epoch=$$(date +%s)
target_epoch=$$(( $$(date -d "05:00" +%s) + 86400 ))
sleep_seconds=$$(( target_epoch - current_epoch ))
echo "$$(date) + $$sleep_seconds seconds"
sleep $$sleep_seconds
docker restart myservice
done