⚓ docker-captain

docker-captain is a friendly command-line tool that helps you manage multiple Docker Compose projects under a single folder.

🚀 Features

For a quick overview of the available commands, run docker-captain --help.

🔍 Project Auto-Detection

docker-captain automatically detects any subfolder containing a Docker Compose file — such as compose.yaml, compose.yml, docker-compose.yaml, or docker-compose.yml.
It scans the folder specified in the configuration file, or passed in the DOCKER_CAPTAIN_PROJECTS environment variable, which you can export here:

export DOCKER_CAPTAIN_PROJECTS=/path/to/your/deployments  # takes precedence over the config file

Detection is purely based on the file names — if a folder contains one of those Compose files, it’s recognized as a valid “project”, taking its name from the folder.

⚙️ Project Management via manage

Use the docker-captain manage command to interactively select which projects should be considered active. You’ll see a multi-select list of all detected projects — you can check or uncheck them using the keyboard, then confirm with Enter.

The selected projects become your active fleet, used by commands like rally and abandon.

🚢 Easy Interaction with Single Projects

Need to start or stop one project? Use these straightforward commands:

docker-captain start calibre --detach --remove-orphans
docker-captain stop calibre --remove-orphans
docker-captain restart calibre

They’re thin wrappers around standard docker compose commands (up, down, and restart), but automatically use the correct compose file and folder context.

Flags:

• -d / --detach: Run containers in background.
• --remove-orphans: Remove orphaned containers not defined in the compose file.

📋 Listing Projects with list

See all detected projects neatly formatted in a Rich table:

docker-captain list

This shows:

• Project name
• Whether it’s Active (selected via manage)
• Whether it’s currently Running (docker compose ls is checked behind the scenes)

You can also view the compose file paths with --verbose:

docker-captain list --verbose

⚓ Rally and Abandon Your Fleet

Once you’ve marked projects as active using manage, you can control them all together:

• Start all active projects:

  docker-captain rally --detach
  

• Stop all active projects:

  docker-captain abandon
  

These commands behave like start and stop, but apply to every active project in one go — perfect for booting up or shutting down your entire environment.

📦 Installation

You can install docker-captain using uv, pipx, or plain pip.

# Install with
uv tool install docker-captain
pipx install docker-captain

# or try it out with
uvx docker-captain

🗒️ Configuration

captain-docker support a simple YAML config file with the following structure:

# ~/.config/docker-captain/config.yaml (on Linux)
projects_folder: /path/to/your/deployments  # environment variable: DOCKER_CAPTAIN_PROJECTS_FOLDER

This configuration file can be generated interactively by running captain-docker configure.

🧭 Folder Structure Example

Your deployments might look like this:

~/Deployments/
├── calibre/
│   └── compose.yaml
├── immich/
│   ├── compose.yaml
│   └── immich.env
├── paperless-ngx/
│   ├── compose.yaml
│   └── paperless-ngx.env
└── syncthing/
    └── compose.yaml

Each subfolder is automatically detected as a project if it has a Compose file.

🧠 Tech Stack

🐙 Example Workflow

# Detect and list all projects
docker-captain list

# Choose which projects are active
docker-captain manage

# Start all active projects
docker-captain rally -d

💡 Inspiration

I've been using docker-compose.yaml files to manage my home server for a while. I found the internet is full of tools to observe docker deployments, but I couldn't find one to manage my Docker Compose files. I wanted something simple, lightweight, and portable.

I stumbled across jenssegers/captain, a Go project with a similar idea - a simple wrapper around docker compose, but only acting on one project at a time. Given Python is my main language and the project hasn't seen any activity in 3 years, I decided to extend its scope and write docker-captain.

Hope this is useful to someone, happy sailing! ⛵

🔧 Development

If you want to contribute to the project, please start by opening an issue.

You can interact with the project via uv and the justfile (from casey/just) at the root of the repository. Simply run just to show the available recipes.

# Create a virtual environment for the project
uv venv --all-groups
source .venv/bin/activate

# Linting, formatting, etc.
just  # show the list of all commands
just lint

# Run docker-captain from the local folder
uv run docker-captain