Anchorage

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Native Linux desktop client for Docker Engine. It talks to the daemon over the UNIX socket and is a plain Qt application that follows your desktop theme. There is no virtual machine and no web view.

Features

• Containers grouped by Compose project with live state; start, stop, restart, remove.
• Per-container logs with search and follow, CPU / memory / network / block I/O charts, and the full inspect tree.
• "Open shell" runs docker exec -it in your terminal emulator.
• Images with pull progress, remove and prune.
• Volumes and networks with the containers that use them.
• Reconnects on its own when the daemon restarts.
• A Settings button in the sidebar sets the log colours, the Docker client backend, the socket path and the terminal command; socket and backend apply after a restart.

Requirements

• Linux with a desktop session (X11 or Wayland).
• Docker Engine 20.10 or newer (API 1.41) reachable over a UNIX socket, and permission to use it (usually membership in the docker group).
• Python 3.11 or newer and PySide6 6.6 or newer (installed by the package).
• For "Open shell": the docker CLI and a terminal emulator (xdg-terminal-exec, or one of the common ones such as konsole, gnome-terminal, kitty, alacritty, foot, xfce4-terminal). A terminal command set in Settings gets docker exec -it <container> sh appended, so it must include the emulator's option for running a command (konsole -e, gnome-terminal --, xterm -e).

Install

Packages for every release are attached to the GitHub releases.

GitHub shows ~universal as .universal in download names. The native packages use the desktop's own Qt and pick up the Plasma style on KDE; the self-contained build uses Fusion with the desktop's dark or light preference on KDE and the GTK theme on GNOME.

For a pipx install, take the two files from the source repository (they are not in the wheel) and install them into your local share directory:

install -Dm644 data/io.github.zexuzzzz.Anchorage.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/io.github.zexuzzzz.Anchorage.desktop
install -Dm644 src/anchorage/data/icon.svg ~/.local/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/io.github.zexuzzzz.Anchorage.svg

Command line

anchorage [--socket PATH] [--backend {native,dockerpy}] [--log-colors {stream,level}] [--language CODE] [--verbose] [--version]

DOCKER_HOST is honoured when it is a unix:// URL. Any other value is ignored with a warning and the default /var/run/docker.sock is used. When DOCKER_HOST is unset (and without --socket), the client uses a rootless daemon's $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/docker.sock if that file exists, and /var/run/docker.sock otherwise.

--backend (or ANCHORAGE_BACKEND) selects the Docker API client. native is the default. dockerpy is experimental and exists for the comparison in docs/backend-comparison.md; it needs the docker-py package: pip install 'anchorage-docker[dockerpy]' or pipx inject anchorage-docker docker, and with distribution packages the system package (python-docker on Arch, python3-docker on Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora). The self-contained packages do not include it.

--log-colors (or ANCHORAGE_LOG_COLORS) chooses how container logs are coloured. stream, the default, paints lines written to stderr red, which mirrors docker logs; level ignores the stream and colours lines by the severity marker found near their start ([ERROR], level=warning, WARN[0000], FATAL: and similar): errors red, warnings yellow.

Flags and environment variables override the values saved in Settings for that run, and the dialog shows such a setting as fixed and leaves its saved value unchanged.

Languages

The interface is available in English, Russian, German, Spanish, French and Simplified Chinese. It follows the system language by default; choose another one in Settings → Language, with --language {auto,en,ru,de,es,fr,zh_CN} or with ANCHORAGE_LANGUAGE. Translations other than Russian have not been reviewed by native speakers; corrections are welcome as issues or pull requests. The catalogues are src/anchorage/i18n/anchorage_<code>.ts (the term list is in docs/translations/GLOSSARY.md), and tools/update_translations.sh regenerates them and the compiled .qm files from the sources.

Qt's own standard buttons and menus (OK/Cancel, the text field context menu) are translated by the distribution's Qt translations package: qt6-translations on Arch, qt6-translations-l10n on Debian/Ubuntu, qt6-qttranslations on Fedora. The self-contained packages include them.

Building packages

packaging/build.sh <arch|deb|rpm|universal|all> builds the committed tree in a Docker container of the target distribution and then installs and smoke-tests the result in a fresh container. Packages land in dist/packages/. The same script runs in the Packages workflow on GitHub Actions. Downloads for the universal build are kept in dist/cache/ and reused after a checksum match; the checks of a target run in parallel, ANCHORAGE_PACKAGING_JOBS at a time (default 3), with their logs in dist/packages/logs/.

Development

uv sync
uv run anchorage
uv run pytest
uv run ruff check . && uv run ruff format --check .
uv run mypy

Integration tests against a real daemon: uv run pytest -m integration.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the checks a change has to pass.

The repository layout: anchorage.docker is a pure-Python Docker Engine API client over AF_UNIX, anchorage.core holds the Qt models, workers and stores, anchorage.ui the widgets and anchorage.app the entry point. data/ holds the desktop entry and AppStream metainfo, packaging/aur/ the PKGBUILD.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.