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.

whaletop containers view

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 to a single service.
Container operations

Logs with filtering and follow mode, interactive shell, attach, inspect, pause, kill and remove.
Previewed clean-up

Each prune operation lists the affected objects and the reclaimable space before anything is removed.
Local and remote

Connects to the local socket, to remote daemons over SSH, and to TLS-protected TCP endpoints.
Event-driven

Views update from the Docker event stream. No manual refresh is required.

Quick start¶

Debian / Ubuntupipxuv

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

pipx install whaletop

uv tool install whaletop

Then start it:

whaletop

Continue with the installation guide for requirements and remote hosts, or with the usage guide for the full key reference.

More views¶

Previewed clean-up of unused images

Log viewer