whaletop

A terminal user interface for Docker in the style of htop. whaletop provides the container, Compose, image, volume and network management of Docker Desktop in a keyboard-driven console application that runs locally, over SSH and on headless servers.

Documentation: https://open-package.github.io/whaletop/

Features

• Live resource usage. CPU, memory, network and block I/O per container, aggregated per Compose project, with host-level meters and CPU history.
• Compose-aware. Containers are grouped by Compose project; start, stop, restart, pull, up and down apply to a whole stack or a single service.
• Container operations. Logs with filtering and follow mode, interactive shell (exec), attach, inspect, pause, kill and remove.
• Images, volumes and networks. Usage by container, size, pull, run and remove.
• Previewed clean-up. Each prune operation lists the affected objects and the reclaimable space before anything is removed.
• Event-driven. Views update from the Docker event stream; no manual refresh is required.

Installation

Debian and Ubuntu

Supported releases: Ubuntu 22.04 and later, Debian 12 and later.

curl -fsSL https://open-package.github.io/whaletop/whaletop.gpg \
  | sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/whaletop.gpg >/dev/null
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/whaletop.gpg] https://open-package.github.io/whaletop stable main" \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/whaletop.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install whaletop

PyPI

For other Linux distributions and macOS. Requires Python 3.10 or later.

pipx install whaletop
# or
uv tool install whaletop

See the installation guide for source installs, upgrades and removal.

Usage

whaletop                         # local Docker daemon
whaletop -H ssh://user@server    # remote daemon over SSH

The daemon is selected from --host, then DOCKER_HOST (including DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY and DOCKER_CERT_PATH), then the current Docker CLI context. See remote hosts for SSH and TLS details.

The full key reference is in the usage guide.

Requirements

• Access to a Docker Engine API (local socket, SSH or TCP). Membership of the docker group or equivalent permissions is required for the local socket.
• The docker CLI, for interactive shells, attach and Compose operations.
• Docker Compose v2 (docker compose), for Compose operations.

Development

git clone https://github.com/open-package/whaletop.git
cd whaletop
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e '.[dev]'
.venv/bin/pytest

Release and packaging procedures are documented in the maintainer guide.

License

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.

whaletop is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Docker, Inc. Docker is a trademark of Docker, Inc.