Docker Cookbook

See Also
• Docker UI 
wiki
 that contains additional documentation
7.7 Using the Wharfee Interactive Shell
Problem
You know how to use the Docker CLI but would like to use a more powerful interac‐
tive shell with autocompletion and history.
208 | Chapter 7: The Docker Ecosystem: Tools

---

Solution
Use 
Wharfee
, a Python-based interactive CLI. Wharfee is based on 
docker-py
(see
Recipe 4.10
) and uses a few Python modules to create the interactive shell.
On a Docker host, install Python and the package index command line installed 
pip
.
Then install Wharfee. For example, on an Ubuntu system:
$ sudo apt-get install python python-pip
$ sudo pip install wharfee
You are now ready to use this new powerful command-line interface. You launch
Wharfee and you enter the interactive shell. The commands that you use are the exact
same Docker commands, except that you do not need to use the 
docker
prefix. As
you type, you will get autocompletion suggestions and some syntax highlighting.
$ wharfee
Version: 0.6.5
Home: http://wharfee.com
wharfee> images
There are no images to list.
wharfee> ps
There are no containers to list.
To start a container, you need to pull an image explicitly:
wharfee> pull nginx:latest
Pulling from library/nginx latest
...
wharfee> run -d -p 80:80 nginx:latest
bf96488c76d617b6d3d2f8aea0ff928eff7fe05e61219eb23f865f60631d9f83
wharfee> ps
Status Created Image ... Command Ports
------------ ------- ------------ ... ---------------------- ---------------
Up 2 seconds now nginx:latest ... nginx -g 'daemon off;' 443/tcp, 80/tcp
Wharfee is a nice CLI that comes in handy with its autocompletion feature and high‐
lighting.