containerctl

containerctl

A lightweight terminal UI for Docker container management, built for speed over remote SSH connections

Overview

containerctl removes the friction from managing containers over SSH. It’s a lightweight CLI that lets you instantly inspect, control, and tail logs from containers — perfect for remote servers where you want speed, not tooling overhead.

It sits as a thin layer between the tview TUI framework and the Moby Docker client. It supports connecting to a remote Docker Engine API directly over SSH, so you can manage containers on a remote host without SSHing in manually.

Install

Download the binary for your platform from the releases page.

macOS (Apple Silicon)

VERSION=v0.3.0  # replace with the desired version
curl -LO https://github.com/Br0ce/containerctl/releases/download/${VERSION}/containerctl-${VERSION}-darwin-arm64

# Verify the checksum against the value published on the releases page
shasum -a 256 containerctl-${VERSION}-darwin-arm64

chmod +x containerctl-${VERSION}-darwin-arm64
sudo mv containerctl-${VERSION}-darwin-arm64 /usr/local/bin/containerctl
containerctl --version

Linux (amd64)

VERSION=v0.3.0  # replace with the desired version
curl -LO https://github.com/Br0ce/containerctl/releases/download/${VERSION}/containerctl-${VERSION}-linux-amd64

# Verify the checksum against the value published on the releases page
sha256sum containerctl-${VERSION}-linux-amd64

chmod +x containerctl-${VERSION}-linux-amd64
sudo mv containerctl-${VERSION}-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/containerctl
containerctl --version

Examples

  # Connect to local Docker
  containerctl

  # Connect to remote host using default SSH key from ~/.ssh/config
  containerctl --host my-host

  # Connect to remote host using with SSH key
  containerctl --host my-host:23 --identity-file ~/.ssh/id_rsa

  # Connect to remote host with username embedded in host and password prompted
  containerctl --host username@my-host --ask-password true

Install from Source

Requirements

• Go 1.26+

git clone https://github.com/Br0ce/containerctl.git
cd containerctl
make build

The binary will be placed at ./bin/containerctl.

Usage

./bin/containerctl
# or
make run

Development

Install dependencies and tooling:

make setup

Available make targets:

Acknowledgements

• Inspired by k9s
• TUI built with tview by @rivo
• Docker integration via the Moby Go client

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.