#SwarmCLI

Simple CLI for managing Docker Swarm clusters similar to k9s.

🐳 swarmcli

A terminal UI for managing Docker Swarm clusters, inspired by k9s.

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👋 Welcome to swarmcli

swarmcli is a command-line interface tool that brings a powerful terminal-based UI to Docker Swarm, much like what k9s does for Kubernetes. Our mission is to empower Swarm users with a fast, intuitive, and feature-rich terminal experience for observing and managing services, containers, nodes, networks, and volumes in a Swarm cluster.

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⚡️ Why swarmcli?

While Kubernetes has many tools for cluster management, Docker Swarm users often rely on CLI commands or custom dashboards with limited interactivity. swarmcli aims to fill this gap by providing:

• A real-time, curses-based UI
• Fast navigation between nodes, services, tasks, and containers
• Live inspection of logs and metrics
• Actions like scaling, updating, restarting, and removing resources
• Keyboard-driven workflows for efficiency

We believe Swarm deserves a first-class tool like k9s — and we’re here to build it.

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🚀 Project Vision

This is an early-stage project inspired by the great work behind k9s. Our goal is to build something truly useful for the Docker Swarm community — a tool that combines speed, usability, and clarity.

We are actively looking for contributors, testers, and sponsors to help bring this vision to life.
If you believe in Docker Swarm and want to support its ecosystem, we’d love your help!

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🧭 Goals

• Build a minimal, fast, terminal UI for Docker Swarm
• Mirror some of the UX patterns and capabilities of k9s
• Maintain low dependency and easy installation
• Focus on practical use cases for real-world Swarm clusters

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🔧 Coming Soon

• Service/task viewer
• Node status dashboard
• Container logs and shell access
• Swarm secrets and configs UI
• Overlay network inspection

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💡 Inspired by k9s

This project is not affiliated with the k9s team, but we deeply admire their work. swarmcli is our attempt to bring a similarly powerful CLI tool to the Docker Swarm world.

Using Docker container to build and run locally

docker build -t swarmcli-dev .
docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD":/app -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock  -w /app swarmcli-dev

or with docker compose:

docker compose run --build --rm swarmcli

Then run:

go run .

Logging

# Production (default)
$ go run .
# → writes JSON logs to  ~/.local/state/swarmcli/app.log

# Development
$ SWARMCLI_ENV=dev go run .
# → writes pretty logs to ~/.local/state/swarmcli/app-debug.log

Colorize log tails. Not perfect but simple:

sudo apt install ccze
tail -f ~/.local/state/swarmcli/app-debug.log | ccze -A 

Integration tests

The logs for the integration tests can be enabled with:

TEST_LOG=1 ./test-setup/testenv.sh test