dockview

Source: RogerSquare/dockview Category: Project tour

dockview — a single-page web dashboard for a homelab’s Docker daemon. See running containers, start/stop/restart them, watch CPU and memory in real time, tail logs. No build step on the frontend.

What it is

A Node/Express backend that talks to the local Docker daemon through the Docker socket, plus a plain HTML/CSS/JS frontend served statically. Socket.IO pushes state updates; the frontend renders them live with vanilla JS. Docker Compose file ships it as one container.

Stack

Layer	Technology
Backend	Express 5, TypeScript
Docker integration	`dockerode` over `/var/run/docker.sock`
System metrics	`systeminformation`
Realtime	Socket.IO 4.8
Frontend	Plain HTML + CSS + JS (no bundler)
Deployment	Docker Compose

Shape

dockview/
├── src/
│   ├── server.ts                     # Express + Socket.IO
│   ├── docker.ts                     # dockerode wrapper
│   ├── metrics.ts                    # systeminformation poller
│   └── routes.ts
├── public/
│   ├── index.html
│   ├── app.js                        # vanilla, no framework
│   └── style.css
├── Dockerfile
└── docker-compose.yml

Features

Container management — start, stop, restart from the browser
Real-time state — container list + system metrics refresh via WebSocket
Metrics — CPU, memory, disk with progress bars
Logs — last 100 lines of any container
Zero config — finds the Docker socket automatically

Deploy

# docker-compose.yml (ships with repo)
services:
  dockview:
    image: dockview:latest
    ports: ["8080:3000"]
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
    restart: unless-stopped

docker compose up -d and the dashboard is at http://host:8080.

Non-obvious design choices

No frontend framework. Just HTML/CSS/JS served from public/. One person, one dashboard, known browser — React would be overkill. Refreshing state via Socket.IO keeps the DOM updates small and manual.
Read-only socket mount (:ro). Dockview reads container state and sends Docker API commands (start/stop), but never executes inside containers. Mount flag is belt-and-suspenders.
Metrics poll interval is 2s. Aggressive enough for live feel, not aggressive enough to eat CPU on the host.
No auth by default. Intended for LAN use. Add a reverse proxy with basic auth (nginx, Caddy) if you expose it.

Gotchas

Mounting the Docker socket is privileged access. Anything inside the dockview container can control the entire Docker daemon. Treat the container as trusted.
systeminformation reads host metrics only when the container can see them. For containerized deployment, mount /proc, /sys, or run the backend on the host directly — otherwise CPU/memory readings reflect the container, not the host.
Container logs are capped at 100 lines for the UI display. For longer tails, shell into the container directly.
Restart counts don’t always match — Docker’s internal restart counter behaves oddly across daemon restarts. Not a dockview bug, a Docker quirk.