Ferrodock

A fast, native desktop app for managing Docker, written entirely in Rust.

Windows · macOS · Linux · Documentation

Ferrodock gives you a clean, responsive view of everything in your Docker Engine: containers with their live logs and stats, Compose projects, images, volumes and networks. It's a single native executable with no Electron, no web view and no background service. It talks straight to the Docker Engine API, uses no CPU while idle, and stays out of your way.

Download

Grab the latest build from the Releases page:

On macOS you can also install with Homebrew:

brew tap manimovassagh/ferrodock https://github.com/manimovassagh/Ferrodock
brew install --cask ferrodock

Ferrodock needs a running Docker Engine: Docker Desktop, Colima, Rancher Desktop, or a native dockerd.

Every release also has a SHA256SUMS.txt. To check that a download is intact, run this in the folder you downloaded to:

shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS.txt --ignore-missing      # macOS
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.txt --ignore-missing          # Linux
Get-FileHash .\Ferrodock-*-windows-x64.zip            # Windows (compare with SHA256SUMS.txt)

Features

• Containers: status, image, ID, live CPU and memory, and ports at a glance. Start, stop, pause, restart and remove with one click, and open published ports in your browser. Filter by All / Running / Stopped.
• Logs: the last 500 lines, then live output as it happens, with a filter and copy.
• Stats: live CPU and memory charts, plus network and disk totals.
• Inspect: environment variables (secrets hidden until you ask), labels, restart policy, health checks and the raw JSON for anything.
• Compose: containers grouped by Docker Compose project. Start, stop, restart or remove a whole project at once.
• Pull and run images: pull with a progress bar, and start a container from any image with a form for ports, environment, volumes and restart policy. It shows the equivalent docker run command as you type.
• Images, Volumes, Networks: size, mountpoints, subnets, and which containers use each one.
• Disk: see where the space goes (images, containers, volumes, build cache) and free it in one step, with a preview of exactly what's deleted.
• Clean up: remove single items or everything unused, always with a confirmation first.
• Command palette (⌘K / Ctrl+K) and keyboard shortcuts for every action: jump to any container, image or volume, or run an action, without touching the mouse.
• Search on every page, and instant updates from Docker's event stream, with an alert when a container crashes or runs out of memory.
• In-app updates: one click downloads, verifies and installs a new version, then restarts.
• Settings for theme (light, dark or follow the system), compact rows and interface size, remembered between runs.
• Resilient: start Ferrodock before Docker and it connects as soon as the engine is up.
• Light on resources: Docker calls run on a background thread so the UI never blocks, and logs and stats only stream for the container you're looking at.

Build from source

You need Rust 1.95 or newer. On macOS, also run xcode-select --install once. On Windows, let the Rust installer set up the Visual Studio C++ Build Tools.

git clone https://github.com/manimovassagh/Ferrodock.git
cd Ferrodock
cargo run --release

On macOS, packaging/macos/bundle.sh builds a universal Ferrodock.app.

Connecting to a different engine

Ferrodock uses the platform default (/var/run/docker.sock, or the \\.\pipe\docker_engine named pipe on Windows) unless DOCKER_HOST is set:

# Docker Desktop on macOS with the default socket turned off
DOCKER_HOST=unix://$HOME/.docker/run/docker.sock ferrodock

# Colima
DOCKER_HOST=unix://$HOME/.colima/default/docker.sock ferrodock

Architecture

Ferrodock is 100% Rust: egui/eframe for the native UI, bollard for the Docker Engine API and tokio for async I/O.

src/
├── main.rs            window setup
├── docker/            Docker Engine API, one file per resource (no UI code)
├── worker/            background thread: Docker calls, log and stats streams
├── theme/             colour palettes, widget styling, fonts
└── app/
    ├── mod.rs         wires the store, the shell and the pages together
    ├── store/         everything currently known about the engine
    ├── page.rs        the Page trait every sidebar section implements
    ├── pages/         containers · compose · images · volumes · networks
    ├── components/    table, details pane, dialogs, charts, toasts
    ├── shell.rs       shared page header and "Docker isn't running" screen
    └── sidebar.rs

How data flows: the UI sends requests to the worker over a channel. The worker calls the Docker Engine and sends the results back into the Store. Pages only read from the store. When a page wants something done, it returns an intent (run an action, or ask for confirmation first) and the app passes it on to the worker.

Adding a page: implement the Page trait in a new file under src/app/pages/ and add one line to pages::all(). The sidebar, header, search and details pane work automatically.

Releases and release notes

• What's new: every release on the Releases page has release notes listing what was added, fixed and changed. The full history is in CHANGELOG.md.
• What a release contains: ready-to-run builds for macOS (universal), Windows and Linux, plus SHA256SUMS.txt.
• Version numbers follow Semantic Versioning. Before 1.0, a minor bump (0.3 → 0.4) means new features or breaking changes, and a patch bump (0.3.0 → 0.3.1) means fixes only. Breaking changes are marked breaking in the notes.
• Pre-releases (e.g. 1.0.0-rc.1) are marked as such on GitHub, and are never shown as the latest release.

How a release is made

Releases are fully automated with release-plz and GitHub Actions. Nobody edits version numbers or the changelog by hand.

flowchart LR
    A["PR merged into main<br/>(feat: … / fix: …)"] --> B["Release PR updated<br/>version + changelog"]
    B -->|merge| C["Tag vX.Y.Z +<br/>draft release"]
    C --> D["Build macOS,<br/>Windows, Linux"]
    D --> E["Attach binaries +<br/>SHA256SUMS.txt"]
    E --> F["Release<br/>published"]

1. Pull requests are squash-merged with Conventional Commit titles: feat: … for features, fix: … for bug fixes. The title becomes the changelog entry.
2. release-plz keeps a release PR open with the next version number and the changelog for it.
3. Merging that PR tags the release and creates a draft. Builds for every platform are attached together with checksums, and only then is it published, so a release never appears without its downloads.

The details, including pre-releases and rebuilding a release's downloads, are in RELEASING.md.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Planned work and ideas live in issues; to suggest something, open a feature request. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the development setup and guidelines, CHANGELOG.md for what's changed, and RELEASING.md for how releases are made. Please report security issues privately as described in SECURITY.md.

Author

Created and maintained by Mani Movassagh (@manimovassagh).

License

Ferrodock is released under the MIT License. It's free to use for personal, commercial and organisational projects.