Guest Post: Calling the Docker CLI from Python with Python-on-whales

At Docker, we are incredibly proud of our vibrant, diverse and creative community. From time to time, we feature cool contributions from the community on our blog to highlight some of the great work our community does. The following is a guest post by Docker community member Gabriel de Marmiesse. Are you working on something awesome with Docker? Send your contributions to William Quiviger (@william) on the Docker Community Slack and we might feature your work!   

The most common way to call and control Docker is by using the command line.

With the increased usage of Docker, users want to call Docker from programming languages other than shell. One popular way to use Docker from Python has been to use docker-py. This library has had so much success that even docker-compose is written in Python, and leverages docker-py.

The goal of docker-py though is not to replicate the Docker client (written in Golang), but to talk to the Docker Engine HTTP API. The Docker client is extremely complex and is hard to duplicate in another language. Because of this, a lot of features that were in the Docker client could not be available in Continue reading