Container Desktop — a native SwiftUI GUI for the container CLI

[sembsa]

Hi! I built a free, open-source macOS app on top of the container CLI and wanted to share it here.

Container Desktop is a Docker Desktop-style GUI, but it deliberately reimplements nothing: every action shells out to the official CLI and parses its --format json output, so the app always shows exactly what the CLI sees — no parallel state, no custom daemon.

What it covers today:

• Containers — run/recreate dialogs (with live pull progress), logs, per-second Swift Charts statistics, file browser, inspect, embedded terminal (exec -it)
• Images — pull & build with streamed progress; volumes / networks / registries / machines — full lifecycle
• System — service start/stop, disk usage, builder, local DNS, system properties, service log viewer
• Menu bar extra with quick actions; localized in English and Polish

Repo: https://github.com/sembsa/ContainerDesktop
Site + DMG: https://sembsa.github.io/ContainerDesktop/
MIT licensed. Requires macOS 26 on Apple Silicon.

A few notes from integrating against the CLI, in case they're useful to others building on top of it:

• system status --format json is great for programmatic health checks (including the unregistered state on exit 1)
• for headless/GUI use, system start needs --enable-kernel-install / --disable-kernel-install, otherwise the interactive kernel prompt blocks on a non-TTY stdin
• system stop can return exit 0 even when launchd deregistration fails, so the app re-checks the status afterwards — happy to file a proper issue about this if that's welcome

Feedback very welcome — and thanks for building container, the JSON output made this app possible. 🙏

[afbjorklund]

There is a name conflict, with the already existing https://container-desktop.com/ project (originally Podman Desktop Companion)

[alex-alecu]

This is great! I would change the screenshots in the english README.md to be in english too.