9 Open Source Docker Tools For Developers

Docker is an open-source program that enables a Linux application and its dependencies to be packaged as a container. There are many open source tools available online to enhance the capabilities of Docker and some of them are listed in this article. We tried to round up some recognized open source Docker tools for developers to take all advantages that Docker has to offer.

1) Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source system for automating deployment, operations, and scaling of containerized applications. Google initially developed Kubernetes to help manage its own LXC containers.

2) Dockersh

A shell which places users into individual docker containers. Dockersh works by allowing each user to have their own individual Docker container.

3) Prometheus

Prometheus is an open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit originally built at SoundCloud. The project has a very active developer and user community. Prometheus works well for recording any purely numeric time series. It fits both machine-centric monitoring as well as monitoring of highly dynamic service-oriented architectures. In a world of microservices, its support for multi-dimensional data collection and querying is a particular strength.

4) Docker Compose

Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. If you want to define and run complex applications using Docker, it might make sense to use a tool like Docker Compose, Docker's orchestration product.

5) Kitematic

Kitematic’s one click install gets Docker running on your Mac and lets you control your app containers from a graphical user interface (GUI). You can seamlessly switch between Kitematic GUI or Docker CLI to run and manage your application containers.

6) Logspout

In addition to Kitematic, Logspout can be a great tool for helping you manage logs generated by programs running inside Docker containers. It helps you to manage log router for Docker containers that runs inside Docker. It attaches to all containers on a host, then routes their logs wherever you want. It also has an extensible module system.

7) Flocker

Flocker is an enterprise-grade data volume manager and multi-host cluster management tool. Flocker is an open-source container data volume manager for your Dockerized applications.By providing tools for data migrations, Flocker gives ops teams the tools they need to run containerized stateful services like databases in production.

8) Weave

Monitor and control Docker containers with zero configuration. Weave is a container-specific implementation of software-defined networking across data centers, and caters mainly to network admins looking to deploy complex applications that span multiple servers.

9) Helios

Helios is a Docker orchestration platform for deploying and managing containers across an entire fleet of servers. Helios provides a HTTP API as well as a command-line client to interact with servers running your containers. It also keeps a history of events in your cluster including information such as deploys, restarts and version changes.