Docker.how – Docker command cheat sheet

Thanks for submitting this. We're happy for anything to be submitted that the community finds useful. But “I built one with help from Claude Code and shipped it in ~1 hour” doesn't really clear the bar for a good Show HN. It's not really “something you've made that other people can play with”; it's more of a list of commands, and lists are explicitly outside the scope of Show HNs. For that reason we've removed the “Show HN” prefix.

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

I am so not understanding the purpose of this...

If you need Docker CLI commands, isn't it just easier to use the CLI that you're already on?

Docker is fully self-documented:

    / # docker
  Usage:  docker [OPTIONS] COMMAND
  
  A self-sufficient runtime for containers
  
  Common Commands:
    run         Create and run a new container from an image
    exec        Execute a command in a running container
  
  …SNIP…
  
  / # docker run --help
  Usage:  docker run [OPTIONS] IMAGE [COMMAND] [ARG...]
  
  Create and run a new container from an image
  
  Aliases:
    docker container run, docker run
  
  Options:
        --add-host list                    Add a custom host-to-IP mapping (host:IP)

  …SNIP…

no docker swarm commands?

Are you on a desert island with no access to the Internet? If you don't know docker, what's faster? Reading all of the documentation first and then figuring out the difference between, say, run and exec, or just copy and pasting a command from a tutorial until it sinks in and you gain a better understanding? This is the AI information age. If docker has eaten your hard drive, and again, you don't know docker, is it easier to have ChatGPT tell you, or muddle around with ps, rm, images, rmi and all of the various options.

If you have a command with a bunch of flags, static documentation like man pages are just such a poor interface compared to eg explainshell.com. This opinion obviously gets me thrown out of the Unix grey beards club, but I don't have a beard and it's not grey.

I've used podman for number of years, possibly too long to really give a good comparison but for the most part it is exactly s/docker/podman. Can't think of anything I've read on the internet that I couldn't just copy the tail of and stick podman in front of it. Any run/build/inspect/volumes/secrets/etc all work like for like by design afaik. There may be additional flags on podmans end for other things it supports (eg: selinux labels).

EDIT: Actually the biggest might be that containers often need a fully qualified name, so instead of `run name/container:latest` you need `run docker.io/name/container:latest`. You can configure default search domains though.

The biggest thing people will (did?) miss is docker-compose. There was a third party `podman-compose` but now it seems that's actually been folded under the official umbrella, along with a `podman compose` command that will "Run compose workloads via an external provider such as docker-compose or podman-compose" so even that gap might be closed up now. Honestly I swapped to just scripting it myself when I swapped to podman - before even the third party podman compose existed, either using sh, .kube files or now systemd units. If you're used to using big 5-10+ container compose files you might have some friction there, might not.

There are differences internally, ex: docker primarily runs as root and has a different networking stack compared to podman, but for most usage on a dev machine it doesn't matter, and matters maybe in a deployment, maybe not.

Unsolicited opinion, I originally found Podman much less intrusive, dockers iptable muckery always rubbed me the wrong way, so it defaulting to userspace and just letting me do any nftable routing I wanted felt much nicer. It also just fees less icky when using it where its default or configuration options were less funnel-you-into-docker.com.

https://github.com/containers/podman-compose