Docker
The full Docker panel — how SwiftServer reaches the engine over SSH, what each tab does, and how to fix connection problems.
SwiftServer includes a complete Docker panel for any machine running Docker. Open it from the machine's Docker card or the Docker section. Browsing is free; management actions are part of Premium.
How SwiftServer talks to Docker
SwiftServer speaks the Docker Engine API directly, over the machine's existing SSH connection — the Docker socket is reached through SSH socket forwarding, so nothing extra is installed and no Docker port is ever exposed.
It finds the engine the way the docker CLI would: DOCKER_CONTEXT and
DOCKER_HOST are honored first, then the usual socket locations are probed —
including rootless Docker and Colima, OrbStack, and Rancher Desktop sockets.
Connecting walks four visible stages: Connect → Detect Engine → Load Data →
Ready.
The tabs
- Overview — engine version and status, container/image/volume counts, reclaimable space, container state breakdown, live CPU and memory across running containers, and top consumers.
- Containers — every container with state (Running, Paused, Exited, …) and health. A container's page shows Logs, Processes, and Inspect, with Start / Stop / Restart / Pause / Kill / Remove operations.
- Compose — Compose projects with per-project up / down / start / stop / restart / pull and recent logs.
- Images — pull with live progress, remove, and prune.
- Volumes — inspect, remove, and prune.
- Networks — inspect and remove.
- Events — the engine's live event stream, as it happens.
Compose discovery
Compose projects are discovered from container labels. A project started on
another machine or whose containers were removed will not appear — run
docker compose up on this machine to see it. SwiftServer uses
the modern docker compose plugin, not the legacy standalone
docker-compose.
When it won't connect
The panel names the problem precisely — "Docker Socket Permission Denied", "Docker Daemon Unreachable", "Docker Not Installed", and friends — and each one has a specific fix. They are all covered, with the commands to run and what to send us, in Troubleshooting → Docker.
Note that Docker on Windows servers is not supported: the engine lives behind a named pipe there, which cannot be reached through OpenSSH.