So much love and many +1s. I use 80x24 terminals (much to the chagrin of
my colleagues) and this one has been a minor irritant for me for quite some
time.

I have to say this often gets me as well.

Any ideas for a solution? Having a smaller version on narrower terminals sounds nice.

Well, ID doesn't really need to be there.

How about this:

NAME               IMAGE              STATUS      PORTS             COMMAND
prickly_perlman    ubuntu:14.04       Up 15s      8000->8000/tcp    sleep 30000

Explanation:

• no ID because containers always have names
• no created, you can inspect for that
• it seems pretty useful to know an overview of all of the ports that are open, but maybe this could be dropped?
• command can be truncated to width of terminal, like /bin/ps

@bfirsh :thumbsup: with these notes;

• Please, don't drop ports, to me they are quite useful to quickly see what ports are connected to what container. Having to inspect each container is cumbersome
• What to do with --no-trunc, now that container-id is no longer visible? Many examples exist that rely on this feature to purge stopped containers
• What will be the (default) sort order? Date created (not logical, since that column is no longer visible)? Alphabetically on container name?
• For future improvement; allow specifying which columns to show and sort on (e.g. --columns=a,f,g --sort=a,e
• For future improvement; make the columns to show and sort on configurable in a configuration-file
• For future improvement; allow setting default filter options (do/do not show stopped containers by default (-a))

What's wrong with piping to a pager?

docker ps | less -S

@benjamin-thomas or docker ps detecting a TTY and piping to less -S by default?

Nice trick @benjamin-thomas , I will definitely use that in the future. One consideration is that does leave off information I care about, most importantly, container names. Whereas in my usecase I don't usually care as much about e.g. CREATED and STATUS.

IMO the use case may vary among users, for me, STATUS _is_ important to get a quick check if my containers are still running nicely or made a 'whoopsie'.

I'm not really sure if this should become a large re-implementation of ps output, or to _start_ with making it a bit cleaner by default and building upon that, making it more configurable by adding options to specify columns to show, sort order and filtering.

@nathanleclaire, just use your arrow keys once you're inside less, you have access to the whole content. Or did I misunderstand you?

@grahamc why not, personally I prefer tools not to do those things automatically. One could always define a shell alias for this IMO if that's needed.

@thaJeztah specifying the column names with switches makes sense to me, like the system ps command /bin/ps -o pid,ruser=RealUser -o comm=Command.

@benjamin-thomas Oh, I hadn't even realized that. Nice! I like this solution a lot.

@benjamin-thomas /bin/ps does this automatically. If you want to disable it, you can pipe it through cat or whatever.

Related to the width of docker ps output: is it really necessary to treat every possible chain of linkages to a given container as a new name for that container? E.g., if I have five containers named A, B, C, D, and E, and A links to B, B links to C, and so on, then E will have five different names: E, D/E, C/D/E, B/C/D/E, and A/B/C/D/E.

Then if B also links to, say, D, E gets even MORE names: B/D/E and A/B/D/E. One run of the system I'm working on starts seventeen containers -- which, all together, owing to 31 dependency relationships, have _three hundred and eighty-seven names_. No matter how wide I make my terminal windows, the output of docker ps is unreadable without a pager. Does it really make sense for the number of names to be _worse than quadratic_ in the number of containers? It would at least be nice if there were a way to disable this pedantic level of enumeration.

@mraccident :+1: docker ps should only show the primary name, not all names for that container

Salut, it was bothering me as well and I just added a '--short' option to docker. keeping the complete port-column.
https://github.com/ChristianKniep/docker/tree/7477-short_ps

$ docker run --name fd1 -d -p 80 -p 22 -p 53 fedora sleep 600
af6599f9b1178b237f6c2524f14cada45a46b234168e5270b99b16d1ce0be295
$ docker run --name fd2 --link fd1:fd1  -d -p 80 -p 22 -p 53 fedora sleep 600
ec2b2afc72dae7e62b197dc5adbcdeb548435ac495b8c935c728eb7aff658004
$ docker run --name fd3 --link fd2:fd2  --link fd1:fd1  -d -p 80 -p 22 -p 53 fedora sleep 600
ac57921063cc6afbe1cf715872dc33df45147ef1f464859c0912261b88e6bb4b
$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                       COMMAND             CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                                                                 NAMES
ac57921063cc        fedora:latest   sleep 600           3 seconds ago       Up 2 seconds        0.0.0.0:49159->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49160->53/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49161->80/tcp   fd3                               
ec2b2afc72da        fedora:latest   sleep 600           11 seconds ago      Up 10 seconds       0.0.0.0:49156->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49157->53/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49158->80/tcp   fd2,fd3/fd2                       
af6599f9b117        fedora:latest   sleep 600           31 seconds ago      Up 30 seconds       0.0.0.0:49153->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49154->53/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49155->80/tcp   fd1,fd2/fd1,fd3/fd1,fd3/fd2/fd1                    
$ ./docker-1.1.2-dev ps -S
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                       PORTS                                                                 NAMES
ac57921063cc        fedora:latest   0.0.0.0:49159->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49160->53/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49161->80/tcp   fd3                               
ec2b2afc72da        fedora:latest   0.0.0.0:49156->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49157->53/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49158->80/tcp   fd2,fd3/fd2                       
af6599f9b117        fedora:latest   0.0.0.0:49153->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49154->53/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49155->80/tcp   fd1,fd2/fd1,fd3/fd1,fd3/fd2/fd1             
$ ./docker-1.1.2-dev ps -h

Usage: docker ps [OPTIONS]

List containers

  -a, --all=false       Show all containers. Only running containers are shown by default.
  --before=""           Show only container created before Id or Name, include non-running ones.
  -f, --filter=[]       Provide filter values. Valid filters:
                          exited=<int> - containers with exit code of <int>
  -l, --latest=false    Show only the latest created container, include non-running ones.
  -n=-1                 Show n last created containers, include non-running ones.
  --no-trunc=false      Don't truncate output
  -q, --quiet=false     Only display numeric IDs
  -S, --short=false     Skip command created and status
  -s, --size=false      Display sizes
  --since=""            Show only containers created since Id or Name, include non-running ones.
$

Since I am a newbe to go, I guess my code could be... optimized...
But amazing how easy it is to change the code, as a yearlong python guy. I like it!

EDIT: Maybe one could fetch the size of the terminal and kick out columns to shorten the lines...

EDIT2: I shorten the NAMES and added a count(CHILDREN), even though it is a little bit misleading, because it counts fd3->fd2->fd1 as well.

$ ~/bin/docker-1.1.2-dev ps -S
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                       PORTS                                                                 NAME                #CHILDREN
9b382826657c        fedora:latest   0.0.0.0:49168->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49169->53/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49170->80/tcp   fd3                 0
93f5a7b13d8b        fedora:latest   0.0.0.0:49165->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49166->53/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49167->80/tcp   fd2                 1
4c6f3564612c        fedora:latest   0.0.0.0:49162->80/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49163->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49164->53/tcp   fd1                 3

EDIT3: Now I extract the correct name

$ ./docker-1.1.2-dev ps -S
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                       PORTS                                                                 NAME                #LINKS
71d9d03bba50        fedora:latest   0.0.0.0:49177->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49178->53/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49179->80/tcp   fd3                 0
cf67008f418f        fedora:latest   0.0.0.0:49174->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49175->53/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49176->80/tcp   fd2                 1
5549c65007b5        fedora:latest   0.0.0.0:49171->22/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49172->53/tcp, 0.0.0.0:49173->80/tcp   fd1                 3

I feel that the ports definition and the verbosity of the times are a big part of the width of the docker ps output. I think abbreviating the times and making the ports definitions wrap over lines would save a lot of space (in addition to allowing me to select/hide columns).

CONTAINER ID     IMAGE                 COMMAND                CREATED     STATUS              PORTS                            NAMES
8a2e6a22ae1f     me/abc-data:latest    "/bin/sh -c bash"      6 sec       Exited (0) 6 sec                                     app-without-ports
749ed051fb73     me/webserver:latest   "/opt/server/run.sh"   4 days      Up 4 days           0.0.0.0:8080->8080/tcp,          my-webserver
                                                                                              192.168.1.1:9990->9990/tcp      
2eb3c43af24f     me/app:latest         "/opt/container-star   8 days      Up 8 days           0.0.0.0:1234->1234/tcp,          some-other-app
                                                                                              0.0.0.0:4567->4567/tcp, 
                                                                                              0.0.0.0:50000->50000/tcp, 
                                                                                              0.0.0.0:50000->50000/udp  

What about allowing to provide a template for example by setting an environment variable DOCKER_PS_FORMAT with columname:width:modifier,columname:width:modifier, ...
where modifier might allow additional settings like no-trunc, full (for example for container id) or short for CREATED where ~1h could be a short form for About an hour ago.

I wrote this bash/zsh function in my ~/.bashrc to better display output of docker ps, you can hide or re-order the columns:

dps()  {
  docker ps $@ | awk '
  NR==1{
    FIRSTLINEWIDTH=length($0)
    IDPOS=index($0,"CONTAINER ID");
    IMAGEPOS=index($0,"IMAGE");
    COMMANDPOS=index($0,"COMMAND");
    CREATEDPOS=index($0,"CREATED");
    STATUSPOS=index($0,"STATUS");
    PORTSPOS=index($0,"PORTS");
    NAMESPOS=index($0,"NAMES");
    UPDATECOL();
  }
  function UPDATECOL () {
    ID=substr($0,IDPOS,IMAGEPOS-IDPOS-1);
    IMAGE=substr($0,IMAGEPOS,COMMANDPOS-IMAGEPOS-1);
    COMMAND=substr($0,COMMANDPOS,CREATEDPOS-COMMANDPOS-1);
    CREATED=substr($0,CREATEDPOS,STATUSPOS-CREATEDPOS-1);
    STATUS=substr($0,STATUSPOS,PORTSPOS-STATUSPOS-1);
    PORTS=substr($0,PORTSPOS,NAMESPOS-PORTSPOS-1);
    NAMES=substr($0, NAMESPOS);
  }
  function PRINT () {
    print ID NAMES IMAGE STATUS CREATED COMMAND PORTS;
  }
  NR==2{
    NAMES=sprintf("%s%*s",NAMES,length($0)-FIRSTLINEWIDTH,"");
    PRINT();
  }
  NR>1{
    UPDATECOL();
    PRINT();
  }' | less -FSX;
}
dpsa() { dps -a $@; }

Workaround hack. Modify which $cols[x] you want to keep as desired.

docker ps | perl -ne '@cols = split /\s{2,}/, $_; printf "%30s %20s %20s\n", $cols[1], $cols[3], $cols[4]'

Wouldn't it be easier to have something like:

$ docker ps --columns=name,id,status,image

and everybody could just alias docker ps.

Thanks, @caiguanhao. Clever interim solution. Added it as a Tackle plugin for the fish shell.

Guys, just made a small improvement on @caiguanhao's code to be able to choose which columns to show. When you have a container that exposes many ports (like the Consul service, which exposes 5 or 6 ports and can make even a 300-characters-wide screen overflow), it's nice to have a command to show every column except those ports, and then another one that shows only the name of the containers and its ports (I added these options as new commands by default):

https://github.com/jpmelos/dotfiles/commit/457a9c68f87eb5bd455aa22bdadab81c2651c2ea

One simple change that would help a little is to reduce the spacing between the CONTAINER ID and IMAGE columns. The other columns are all separated by 3 spaces, but these two are separated by 8.

My 5 cents until they make 'docker ps' readable:

https://github.com/t0mk/dosk#dops

Are we going to see any update on that?
docker ps is the most common command I think. I hope it's not so hard to give us the option to filter columns to show.
( I'd expect something like that )

dibs

Like @AntouanK said and @wpp already suggested, a columns flag would be prefered for most situations

I think #10255 should address this.

@duglin Does this make the default shorter, though? I'd like to keep this open if not.

@bfirsh good point, no it wouldn't change the default. But I'm not sure we can change the default until v2 (if/when that is) because we'd break existing clients if we did.

same here. maybe some intelligent mechanism that selects default columns displayed by applying thresholds to ENV['COLUMNS']?

I agree with https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/7477#issuecomment-70243594, just give us the option to choose the columns.

I also vote for the https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/7477#issuecomment-70243594 option.
docker ps would be docker ps --columns=id,image,command,created,status,ports,name and it could be easily to implement more columns such as ip as some users wanted https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/8786

+1 for --columns

As a workaround, I combine docker ps -q with docker inspect --format:

docker ps -q | xargs docker inspect --format '{{printf "%.12s\t%s" .Id .Config.Cmd}}'

You have to dig into the output of docker inspect and golang templating, but it's almost infinitely configurable.

@jafcrocker Nice one. Maybe we can make a public gist to keep there a collection of workarounds like this one? Until we get some flags to customise the output properly...

we just merged #14699 that allows you to run docker ps --format ... to change the ps output. You can also set a default format if you want, check this screenshot out:

I'm going to close this issue as fixed. Please, feel free to give that a try and let us know what you think.

For those wanting to give it a try, "master" builds can be found at https://master.dockerproject.org and this feature should be in there soon (if not already)

While the --format is a really nice addition, I do not think this solves the primary problem. Almost all command line tools that I use daily handles variable sized terminals properly. Most by looking at the $COLUMNS environment variable and displaying the text appropriate.

For example, ps aux in a 80x24 terminal:

And in a 137x24 terminal:

It changes column width and shortens the command so everything fits nicely in one line. Everything for readability and easy to parse for a human.

Sure, I can write a bash wrapper that will apply different formatting options depending on $COLUMNS but it starts to sounds really hacky and something I think should be default behaviour for any command line program. I'm sorry to say, the output of docker is messy and hard to read.

Is there a reason this is not done? Any limitation in some library or a decision from your part? Need to know if this is something worth to consider to fix in a PR, or, maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree.

@nsg: Agreed - the default output could still do with improvement.

Has there been any update on this issue?

So for whatever reason, image hashes are no longer truncated in ps output. I already had to make my terminal ultra-wide (taking up the whole screen) just to make docker usable in the past, now that's no longer enough. As of 1.7.1, each line is about 200 columns wide. Who uses a terminal that wide?

I've been playing around a bit with this.

Removing ID and created gets us a bit of the way there:

NAMES                 IMAGE          STATUS                     PORTS                         COMMAND
elegant_turing        nginx          Up 13 secs                 0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp, 443/tcp   "nginx -g 'daemon off"
composedemo_web_1     composedemo_   Exited (2) 23 secs ago                                   "/bin/sh -c 'python a"
composedemo_redis_1   redis          Exited (137) 11 secs ago                                 "/entrypoint.sh redis"
elated_carson         hello-world    Exited (0) 23 mins ago                                   "/hello"

Still too long though. We could ignore 0.0.0.0:

NAMES                 IMAGE          STATUS                     PORTS                 COMMAND
elegant_turing        nginx          Up 13 secs                 80->80/tcp, 443/tcp   "nginx -g 'daemon off"
composedemo_web_1     composedemo_   Exited (2) 23 secs ago                           "/bin/sh -c 'python a"
composedemo_redis_1   redis          Exited (137) 11 secs ago                         "/entrypoint.sh redis"
elated_carson         hello-world    Exited (0) 23 mins ago                           "/hello"

But still a bit long. Perhaps some creativity is needed to shorten the status... something parseable/scannable, but still short... Exit (2) 23s ago maybe?

Although the command can be shortened, we also would need to shorten anything else to make sure at least _some_ of the command is shown. Can't shorten the name. The image could perhaps get a "..." when it's truncated. Same for long ports.

Thoughts?

Some hacks are here: https://github.com/docker/docker/compare/master...bfirsh:7477-shorter-ps

@bfirsh I think you're on to something.

If you change Status (like you said) to 23s instead of 23 secs and trunc both image and ports column it should be short enough.

@bfirsh you're starting to work in the default view? Are you thinking the --format option some people are talking?

Also, we could use s instead of sec and m instead of mins

@aanm we already have the --format in docker 1.8. You can also change the default ps behavior in the client configuration file adding something like this:

{
  "psFormat": "table {{ .ID }}\\t{{ .Status }}"
}

You can set your default with the format you like better.

I often need to see current container name, for run next docker exec to attach in.

so, I hope if can move NAMES after IMAGE, it will good, I don't need some config anymore.

Thanks.

Problem in docker 1.8.1 (fc21)
--format does not know about container names.

docker ps --format "{{.ID}}t{{.Image}}t{{.CreatedAt}}t{{.RunningFor}}t{{.Status}}t{{.Name}}" -a
Template parsing error: template: :1:64: executing "" at <.Name>: Name is not a field of struct type *ps.containerContext

So far using:
docker ps -a | perl -ne 'chomp; @cols = split /s{2,}/, $_; $name=pop @cols; printf "%-28s %-20s %-20s %-30sn", $name, $cols[1], $cols[3], $cols[4]'

@parf the placeholder is actually called Names:

https://github.com/calavera/docker/blob/missing_ps_placeholder/docs/reference/commandline/ps.md#formatting

thanks to @caiguanhao for inspiration.

i'm just leaving this here:

IMAGE                                NAMES                     STATUS              PORTS
xxxxx:x.x                            xx_xxxxxxxx_xxxxx         Up About an hour    10.23.123.111:26002->6379/tcp
xxxxxxxxx:x.x                        xx_xxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxxx     Up About an hour    29015/tcp
                                                                                   10.23.123.111:26001->8080/tcp
                                                                                   10.23.123.111:26000->28015/tcp
xxxxxxxx_xx_xxxxxxxx                 xx_xxxxxxxx               Up About an hour    127.0.0.1:8086->8080/tcp
xxxxxx_xx                            xx_xxx_xxx                Up About an hour    127.0.0.1:8082->8888/tcp
xxx_xx                               xx_xxx                    Up About an hour    127.0.0.1:8083->8080/tcp
xxxx/xxxxxxxxx-xxxxxx                xx_xxx_xxxxxxxxx_xxx      Up 2 hours          10.23.123.111:25002->25565/tcp
xxxx/xxxxxxxxx-xxxxxx                xx_xxx_xxxxxxxxx_xxxxxx   Up 2 hours          10.23.123.111:25001->25565/tcp
xxxxxx/xxxxxxxx:xxxxxx               xxx_xxxxxxxx              Up 3 hours          127.0.0.1:8080->8080/tcp
xxxxxxxxxx/xxxxxxx                   xxx_xxxxxxx               Up 3 hours          10.23.123.111:25->25/tcp
                                                                                   10.23.123.111:587->587/tcp
xx_xxx                               xx_xx                     Up 3 hours          10.23.123.112:9987->9987/tcp
                                                                                   10.23.123.112:10011->10011/tcp
                                                                                   10.23.123.112:30033->30033/tcp
                                                                                   10.23.123.112:9987->9987/udp
xxxx.xx/xxxxxxxxx/xxxxxx:x.x.x       xxx_xxxxxx                Up 3 hours          10.42.241.123:22->22/tcp
                                                                                   443/tcp
                                                                                   127.0.0.1:8000->80/tcp
xxxxxx/xxxxxx-xxxxxx:xxxxxx          xxx_xxxxxx_xx_xxxxxx      Up 3 hours
xxxx.xx/xxxxxxxxx/xxxxxxxxxx:x.x-x   xxx_xxxxxx_xxxxxxxx       Up 3 hours          5432/tcp
xxxx.xx/xxxxxxxxx/xxxxx:xxxxxx       xxx_xxxxxx_xxxxx          Up 3 hours          6379/tcp

/etc/profile.d/dps.sh: https://gist.github.com/GottZ/4a6c2af314d73cd8b71d

Nice @GottZ, thanks for sharing!

@thaJeztah i just made each even line bold for better visibility. have fun :smile:

Meanwhile, my approach with awk:

$ alias my_docker_ps="docker ps | awk 'BEGIN{FIELDWIDTHS = \"20 33 23 20 20 70 20\"}{print \$1,\$2,\$5,\$7}'"

$ my_docker_ps         
CONTAINER ID         IMAGE                             STATUS               NAMES
b83fe9a6a06e         kibana                            Up 32 minutes        kibana              
4d78b9cd2bed         elasticsearch                     Up About an hour     evil_feynman        
fbbc40a49569         mattermost/platform               Up 9 weeks           mattermost-dev      
3b4dd9d00305         outcoldman/splunk:latest          Up 9 weeks           boring_yalow           

@danidelvalle why not simply;

docker ps --format "table {{.ID}}\t{{.Image}}\t{{.Status}}\t{{.Names}}"

This has already been committed and released. I don't understand, why is this still open?

@thaJeztah you're right, thanks :)

@ovidiub13 mainly because of https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/7477#issuecomment-123898874

yeah this is annoying..

I'm usually fine with just truncating the default ps at the terminal colum width:

dps() {
  docker ps | cut -c-$(tput cols)
}

+1 for --columns=name,id,status,image

This issue still exists unfortunately. Anyhow a workaround is to put the below (tested in Ubuntu) in your .bashrc:

CMD_WATCHDOCKER="watch \"docker ps -q | xargs docker inspect --format '{{.Id}} @{{.Config.Image}} @{{.Config.Cmd}} @{{range \\\$p, \\\$conf := .NetworkSettings.Ports}}{{\\\$p}}->{{(index \\\$conf 0).HostPort}}{{end}} @{{.NetworkSettings.IPAddress}}' | column -t -s='@' | cut -c 1-5,64-\""
alias watchdocker='eval $CMD_WATCHDOCKER'

Running watchdocker gives:

4596c3   ruby:2.2.2   [bash]                        172.17.0.82
827ca9   postgres     [postgres]   5432/tcp->5432   172.17.0.72

@Pithikos docker ps--format '{{ .ID }}\t{{ .Image }}\t{{ .Command }}\t{{ .Ports }}' will give you this without making all those API calls for each container.
Also you can put this into ~/.docker/config.json to make it the default format

@cpuguy83 which version does support this? I never managed to get this working, neither at work or home. Would be cool if in the docs it was mentioned which version supports what.

@Pithikos Either 1.8 or 1.9, not sure.

fit docker ps/images to 80 columns

https://github.com/rhoit/my-config/blob/e374a3cf28f3bc461766ce32f823207692c74f83/shell/shellrc.d/docker.sh#L10-L28

dibs

correct usge is with "table" keyword in format string, this will give you nice spaced formatting docker ps -a --format="table {{.ID}}\t{{.Names}}\t{{.Image}}\t{{.Command}}\t{{.Status}}"

I'm closing this one as it seems that the --format flag for ps is addressing the issue. Thanks all!

This issue was perhaps not well named. It still remains that the _default_ for commands should be 80 chars wide. Happy for this to be closed though because it's not that important.

--format seems not well enough.
https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/ps/#/formatting

how about add option to make result display vertically, like select * from foobar\G in MySQL

I usually just want to know which containers are running (and for how long).

This does the trick for me:

$ docker ps --format "table {{.Names}}\t{{.Status}}"

Even better, I wrapped it in a really easy to remember alias:

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

Here's a sample of the output:

NAMES                     STATUS
projectxyz_chrome_1       Up 11 minutes
projectxyz_web_1          Up 11 minutes
projectxyz_app_1          Up 11 minutes
projectxyz_phpmyadmin_1   Up 11 minutes
projectxyz_memcached_1    Up 11 minutes
projectxyz_db_1           Up 11 minutes

You can learn more about the --format command here:
https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/ps/

Hope it helps someone 😃

@joshmedeski you can also store your preferred formatting in a configuration file, so that it is used as default; https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/cli/#/configuration-files

In the spirit of saving keystrokes here is the small bash script I wrote to take a list of arguments, construct the go template string and execute the docker ps command so as to give immediate display of whatever columns are wanted in whatever order. Putting configuration in a file is not dynamic enough - I find that having one set of columns one moment and different set a moment later is pretty useful. Script is here, hope its useful to someone. Cheers -andy

#!/usr/bin/env python2
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import subprocess

show_all = False
fields = [
  "Names",
  "Command",
  "Image",
  "CreatedAt",
  "Status",
]

cmd = ['docker', 'ps']
if show_all:
  cmd += ['-a']
cmd += ['--format', '\t'.join([('{{ .'+field+' }}') for field in fields])]
response = subprocess.check_output(cmd)

dataset = [fields]
dataset_widths = [0] * len(fields)
for idx, line in enumerate(response.split('\n')[:-1]):
  fieldvalues = line.decode('utf-8').replace(u"\u2026", u"_").split('\t')
  dataset.append(fieldvalues)
  for jdx, fieldvalue in enumerate(fieldvalues):
    if dataset_widths[jdx] < len(fieldvalue):
      dataset_widths[jdx] = len(fieldvalue)

for idx, items in enumerate(dataset):
  output_line = ['{:>3d}'.format(idx)]
  for jdx, item in enumerate(items):
    output_line.append(('{:'+str(dataset_widths[jdx])+'s}').format(item))
  print '   '.join(output_line)

put this in your ~/.docker/config.json
{ "psFormat": "table {{.Names}}\\t{{.Image}}\\t{{.RunningFor}} ago\\t{{.Status}}\\t{{.Command}}", "imagesFormat": "table {{.Repository}}\\t{{.Tag}}\\t{{.ID}}\\t{{.Size}}" }

And modify to your liking. For me the problem was always long image name (since it contained my personal repository name for my custom images)

everyone who is looking for a better docker ps should check this out:
https://github.com/moncho/dry

Workaround hack. Modify which $cols[x] you want to keep as desired.

docker ps | perl -ne '@cols = split /\s{2,}/, $_; printf "%30s %20s %20s\n", $cols[1], $cols[3], $cols[4]'

Thanks.

This was all that I needed:
docker ps | perl -ne '@cols = split /\s{2,}/, $_; printf "%30s %20s %20s", $cols[1], $cols[4], $cols[6]'

giving IMAGE STATUS NAMES
in well aligned columuns

EDIT

it it better to create a bash alias with something like this:

docker ps --format="table {{.Image}}\t{{.Status}}\t{{.Ports}}\t{{.Names}}"

Notice the "table" format

Workaround hack. Modify which $cols[x] you want to keep as desired.

docker ps | perl -ne '@cols = split /\s{2,}/, $_; printf "%30s %20s %20s\n", $cols[1], $cols[3], $cols[4]'

That's awesome, thnx

@nagracks if you want that format as default, I'd recommend using the --format approach (which can be stored in your ~/.docker/config.json configuration file)

If I modify my .docker/config.json file with something custom like this:

"imagesFormat": "table {{.ID}}  {{.Repository}}\t{{.Tag}}  {{.CreatedSince}}  {{.Size}}",
"psFormat": "table {{.ID}}  {{.Names}}\t{{.Image}}  {{.Command}}  {{.Status}}",

How can I then use the docker ps command to view the default format? I tried docker ps --format "", but it still used the config.

Using docker ps --format=table should give the default table format

I would really appreciate if there was a less-verbose version of the output available by default, without having to remember what the table formatting syntax is or what the variable names are in the formatting context. Even if the default would be kept as it is, a flag for a _pre-formatted_ less verbose version would be useful.

As to what information could be reduced from a less verbose version, here's my two cents:

• Name and ID for most uses serve the same purpose, and such one could be eliminated.
• Creation datetime is probably something you'd be fine with being omitted from the less verbose output
• I'd also personally be fine with omitting ports from the less verbose output

In my use case I usually just want to look up the name of the container I'll be running some other commands against (e.g. on a remote server node), and having the output be wrapped across multiple lines makes it difficult to find out the exact name of the container I'm interested in.

I'm somewhat disappointed the "approved" solution here is "just configure an alias with --format parameter", as if you would always be running these commands in environments where you have your alias defined, or remember the formatting syntax and context variables

I still run into this issue daily, FWIW. My current output of docker ps -a is _180 characters wide_ -- more than half of my 27" 4K screen!

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                                          COMMAND                 CREATED             STATUS                    PORTS               NAMES
994be99dddd1        nvidia/cuda:10.2-devel-ubuntu18.04             "bash"                  4 days ago          Exited (0) 4 days ago                         eager_tesla
30796cc3db32        nvidia/cuda:10.2-devel-ubuntu18.04             "bash"                  4 days ago          Exited (127) 4 days ago                       laughing_maxwell
ed5f20c1cff3        gcr.io/deeplearning-platform-release/tf2-gpu   "/entrypoint.sh bash"   4 days ago          Exited (0) 3 days ago                         distracted_ardinghelli
0bb06e992ef4        gcr.io/deeplearning-platform-release/tf2-gpu   "/entrypoint.sh bash"   4 days ago          Exited (0) 4 days ago                         bold_brahmagupta

The average user shouldn't be expected to alias their docker ps command just to make it readable on a reasonably sized terminal. Maybe it doesn't have to be as small as 80 characters, but it certainly shouldn't be 180 characters.

I'm tempted to open a pull request as a strawman. 😏