Explore the Containers view in Docker Desktop

The Containers view lists all running and stopped containers and applications. It provides a clean interface to manage the lifecycle of your containers, interact with running applications, and inspect Docker objects—including Docker Compose apps.

Container actions

Use the Search field to find a specific container by name.

From the Containers view you can:

Start, stop, pause, resume, or restart containers
View image packages and CVEs
Delete containers
Open the application in VS code
Open the port exposed by the container in a browser
Copy the docker run command for reuse or modification
Use Docker Debug

Resource usage

From the Containers view you can monitor your containers' CPU and memory usage over time. This can help you understand if something is wrong with your containers or if you need to allocate additional resources.

When you inspect a container, the Stats tab displays further information about a container's resource utilization. You can see how much CPU, memory, network and disk space your container is using over time.

Inspect a container

You can obtain detailed information about the container when you select it.

From here, you can use the quick action buttons to perform various actions such as pause, resume, start or stop, or explore the Logs, Inspect, Bind mounts, Debug, Files, and Stats tabs.

Logs

Select Logs to view output from the container in real time. While viewing logs, you can:

Use Cmd + f/Ctrl + f to open the search bar and find specific entries. Search matches are highlighted in yellow.
Press Enter or Shift + Enter to jump to the next or previous search match respectively.
Use the Copy icon in the top right-hand corner to copy all the logs to your clipboard.
Show timestamps
Use the Clear terminal icon in the top right-hand corner to clear the logs terminal.
Select and view external links that may be in your logs.

You can refine your view by:

Filtering logs for specific containers, if you're running a multi-container application.
Using regular expressions or exact match search terms

Inspect

Select Inspect to view low-level information about the container. It displays the local path, version number of the image, SHA-256, port mapping, and other details.

Exec/Debug

If you have not enabled Docker Debug in settings, the Exec tab displays. It lets you quickly run commands within your running container.

Using the Exec tab is the same as running one of the following commands:

docker exec -it <container-id> /bin/sh
docker exec -it <container-id> cmd.exe when accessing Windows containers

For more details, see the docker exec CLI reference.

If you have enabled Docker Debug in settings, or toggled on Debug mode to the right of the tab options, the Debug tab displays.

Debug mode has several advantages, such as:

A customizable toolbox. The toolbox comes with many standard Linux tools pre-installed, such as vim, nano, htop, and curl. For more details, see the docker debug CLI reference.
The ability to access containers that don't have a shell, for example, slim or distroless containers.

To use debug mode:

Hover over your running container and under the Actions column, select the Show container actions menu. From the drop-down menu, select Use Docker Debug.
Or, select the container and then select the Debug tab.

To use debug mode by default, navigate to the General tab in Settings and select the Enable Docker Debug by default option.

Files

Select Files to explore the filesystem of running or stopped containers. You can also:

See which files have been recently added, modified, or deleted
Edit a file straight from the built-in editor
Drag and drop files and folders between the host and the container
Delete unnecessary files when you right-click on a file
Download files and folders from the container straight to the host