Roadmap: Lite CLI for running containers on Remote Docker Engine Without Installing Docker Engine Locally

[psychemedia]

A recent blog post on the AWS blog — AWS and Docker collaborate to simplify the developer experience — demonstrated the new Docker Engine ECS integration as a simple CLI route to running containers remotely on Amazon ECS.

One benefit of running containers remotely is that users on devices that cannot run Docker natively (iPad users, users on old / legacy Windows machines) can launch and run containers in the cloud and access them via web browser UIs.

It would be useful if a "lite" Docker CLI were available that would allow users to run docker ecs ... commands, which launch and manage remote containers, without also having to install the full Docker Desktop application. This would allow users who cannot run Docker Desktop or a local Docker Engine to launch and run containers remotely using a relevant subset of the Docker CLI commands.

At the moment, other partial workarounds are available. For example, to run containers on Digital Ocean, the doctl CLI can be used to launch a Digital Ocean Docker droplet. If the user has ssh available, they can then ssh in to the droplet and start their container from within the remote environment.

[binman-docker]

The CLI is separate from Engine or Desktop, though usually included in most distributions of them. https://github.com/docker/cli/

The Linux binaries are published as "docker-ce-cli" packages in our apt/yum repos.

Mac builds: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/binaries/#install-client-binaries-on-macos

You can unofficially find Windows builds here: https://github.com/StefanScherer/docker-cli-builder/tags

[psychemedia]

@binman-docker Thanks for the pointers. I think it could still be useful if there were an easily found official simple CLI. A lot of applications are bundled in containers now, and just because folk are happy using the apps that run in headless containers via browser accessed http/HTML UIs doesn't mean they are developers who are happy finding and installing things from repos.

The CLI step is often a blocker, and in the AWS case, setting up credentials could be a challenge for many. But if barriers to access are reduced both in terms of developer experience/novice usability and in terms of computer requirements (eg providing something that can be run from an old low spec machine with an easy to install package) that it allows more people to use software distributed by containers even if they aren't Docker developers themselves. (But being able to use third party/off-the-shelf containers easily may encourage then to explore how to create their own containers.)

[loverdeg]

I have wanted this for years.

[PavelSosin-320]

Chocolatery for Windows, apt for Ubuntu, yum, dnf, and other installers for WSL, ...
Docker CLI and Docker-compose for .....
But the Package manager has to be installed before.
Who will install Docker CLI plugins and Config Docker client config file with DNS configs?
Looks like a long page with links to documentation.
Indeed, Docker daemon is not required on the client-side, i.e. Docker Daemon can be and should be skipped by the User desire but Selection of Docker CLI version, Docker CLI configuration Docker CLI plugins installation and Docker context configuration are needed to make Docker CLI working.
The Low-level Docker Client is Docker REST API which needs only CURL.