Posted on February 5, 2016.

At work we’ve been using Docker for a minute now to help with our development environments and it’s been pretty rad so far.

A neat little trick I recently learned was how to customize docker ps output. By default, it’s a little wide and noisy for my tastes:

$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                                         NAMES
fb0dabd44605        67e9ad19dc79        "/entrypoint.sh mysql"   15 minutes ago      Up About a minute   3306/tcp                                      core-mysql.dev
db6374029e36        38ef04bdb4c4        "/opt/zookeeper/bin/z"   17 minutes ago      Up 3 minutes        2888/tcp, 0.0.0.0:2181->2181/tcp, 3888/tcp    zookeeper.dev

Not terrible, but there’s some stuff in here I’m not super interested in all the time, and I’m old and cranky and like my terminals a bit on the small-side.

Enter The –format

Thankfully, someone made it super easy to configure the output from docker ps:

$ docker ps --format="table {{.Names}}\t{{.Ports}}\t{{.Status}}"
NAMES               PORTS                                        STATUS
core-mysql.dev      3306/tcp                                     Up 10 minutes
zookeeper.dev       2888/tcp, 0.0.0.0:2181->2181/tcp, 3888/tcp   Up 12 minutes

Sweet, right? Even nicer, you can add it to your docker config so you’ll never have to worry about it again:

$ cat ~/.docker/config.json
{
  "psFormat": "table {{.Names}}\t{{.Ports}}\t{{.Status}}"
}

Which, finally, gives you:

$ docker ps
NAMES               PORTS                                        STATUS
core-mysql.dev      3306/tcp                                     Up 10 minutes
zookeeper.dev       2888/tcp, 0.0.0.0:2181->2181/tcp, 3888/tcp   Up 12 minutes

The full list of formatting options are laid out nicely at https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/ps