Suggestion: Integrated menu bar app

[alfonsodev]

It would be nice to have a menu bar app, it could :

• Show the status of the docker daemon.
• Stop / start docker daemon
• Change docker daemon settings
  • For instance networking settings as default-gateway, dns, certs .. etc
• Link to kitematic
• About docker toolbox, with docker version information.

Maybe for advance user this could seem irrelevant, but is has a great value for companies that want to move their development environment to docker but need custom networking settings or certs when running the daemon, right now the only option is either ssh into the boot2docker vm and restart the daemon with the correct parameters or build a modified boot2docker.iso with the custom settings.
It's doable , but would be much easier from a GUI.

[alfonsodev]

Could this https://github.com/nickgartmann/boot2docker-status be a starting point ?

[mchiang0610]

@alfonsodev Thanks for the suggestion for this. As always, we will keep this open for the community to vote on, and discuss.

At the moment, we are focused on fixing some toolbox bugs to get as much people have toolbox running.

[alfonsodev]

Thanks @mchiang0610 , I submitted this as an idea for the Docker Global Hack Day. If anybody is interested follow this issue. @mchiang0610 What's is your opinion about using Electron for this ?, I see the advantage that works for Windows, Mac and Linux.

[alfonsodev]

Here some examples on how to build a menubar app with electron :
https://github.com/maxogden/menubar https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome-electron

[khornberg]

I think electron would be the way to go.

My thought on this has been that I often forget that the VM (on OS X) is running and I don't know how many containers are started. I can easily go to the cli but a nice quick visual indicator would be nice.

[khornberg]

Some concept code. Implements the first point of the suggestion by @alfonsodev

https://github.com/khornberg/docker-indicator

[alfonsodev]

@khornberg thanks for your reply and concept code, I've been thinking more about this, and since now the default software to interact with docker is docker-machine, instead of boot2docker, that means it can be more than one docker machine running, so it gets more complex. maybe clicking on the icon and showing the status of all machines registered by docker-machine would be more useful. it would be perfect if docker-machine would implement an api to interact with it, then making a UI would be much easier. Thoughts ?

[khornberg]

I think that starting with a single machine would be best. Then as that is solidified we could move on to multiple machines.

I also envision a simple on/off toggle for each container on a machine.

After a brief look at the docker api, I did not find an api endpoint to change network settings or start/stop the daemon. Is this part of docker-machine? How are you thinking that those things are done?

[khornberg]

I've expanded the concept code to something that works. https://github.com/khornberg/docker-indicator - OS X installed included.