10 Useful Docker Commands, Aliased

Purpose:

• Improve day-to-day Docker visibility
• Reduce context switching and typo-driven mistakes
• Make common inspection tasks fast and repeatable

Safety Legend:

• 🟢 Safe - Read-only, no side effects
• 🟡 Caution - Informational, often followed by cleanup actions
• 🔴 Dangerous- Can remove data or disrupt services

Source explicitly. Do NOT auto-load unless you understand each alias.

Core Visibility & Status

🟢 Live CPU, memory, network, and disk I/O stats for running containers

alias dstats='docker stats'

🟢 Human-readable list of running containers

alias dps='docker ps --format "table {{.ID}}\t{{.Names}}\t{{.Status}}\t{{.Image}}"'

🟢 List all containers, including stopped ones

alias dpsa='docker ps -a'

Inspection & Runtime Metadata

🟢 Full container inspection (config, mounts, env, networks)

alias dinspect='docker inspect'

🟢 Output a container's internal IP address

alias dip='docker inspect -f "{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}"'

🟢 Show the configured restart policy for a container

alias drestart='docker inspect -f "{{.HostConfig.RestartPolicy.Name}}"'

🟢 Show processes running inside a container

alias dtop='docker top'

Logs & Live Debugging

🟢 Follow container logs in real time

alias dlogs='docker logs -f'

🟢 Follow logs starting with the last 50 lines

alias dlogs50='docker logs -f --tail 50'

🟢 Show the last 100 log lines without following

alias dlogs100='docker logs --tail 100'

🟢 Interactive shell into a running container

alias dexec='docker exec -it'

Networking Visibility

🟢 List Docker networks

alias dnetls='docker network ls'

🟢 Inspect Docker network configuration and attachments

alias dneti='docker network inspect'

Images & Build Insight

🟡 List local Docker images

alias dmages='docker images'

🟢 Show image layer history (spot bloat)

alias dimgh='docker history'

🟢 Inspect image metadata and entrypoints

alias dimgi='docker image inspect'

🟡 List dangling (untagged) images

alias dimgd='docker images -f "dangling=true"'

Storage & Volume Insight

🟡 Inspect volume configuration and metadata

alias dvolinspect='docker volume inspect'

🟢 Show host filesystem path for a volume

alias dvolmount='docker volume inspect -f "{{.Mountpoint}}"'

🟢 Display volume driver and scope

alias dvoldriver='docker volume inspect -f "Driver: {{.Driver}} / Scope: {{.Scope}}"'

🟡 List unused volumes

alias dvoldangling='docker volume ls -f "dangling=true"'

🟡 Verbose disk usage, including per-volume size

alias ddfv='docker system df -v'

Disk Usage & Cleanup

🟡 Docker disk usage summary

alias ddf='docker system df'

🔴 Remove stopped containers, unused networks, and dangling images

alias dprune='docker system prune'

🔴 Remove all unused images (forces rebuilds)

alias dprunea='docker system prune -a'

🔴 Permanently delete unused volumes (data loss)

alias dvolprune='docker volume prune'