Docker
Your local containers, images, volumes, networks and compose stacks inside PandaOS, with a shell, a file browser and a filesystem diff for every container, and the same surface exposed to Panda as tools.
What the Docker app is
Debugging a container normally means leaving your editor for Docker Desktop or a terminal, and then narrating what you found back to the AI. The Docker tab removes that trip. It talks to the Docker engine on your machine directly, so containers, images, volumes, networks, compose stacks and disk usage are one click away from the chat that is working on them, and Panda sees the same thing you do.
Turning it on
Docker is off until you ask for it. Open Settings, Apps, Docker and turn on Enable Docker. That does two things at once: the Docker tab appears in the dock, and the Docker tools become available to Panda.
The settings card then reports what it found on your machine, Running with the engine version, Not running, or Not installed, with a refresh if you have just started the engine. PandaOS speaks to the local Docker socket itself, so anything that provides one works, Docker Desktop, Colima, or a plain daemon. There is nothing to configure beyond having the engine up.
The six views
| View | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Containers | Everything running and stopped, with live state, plus start, stop, restart, rename, remove, and running an image as a new container. |
| Images | Local images with their history, pull, tag, run, remove, and prune. |
| Volumes | Volumes with their sizes, create, remove, and prune. |
| Networks | Networks, what is attached, connect and disconnect containers, create, remove, and prune. |
| Compose | Compose stacks discovered on the machine, with up, down, restart, pull, logs, and the resolved config. |
| System | Disk usage broken out by images, containers, volumes and build cache, with per-type reclaim and a full prune. |
Reclaiming space asks before it acts, and asks a second time before it touches volumes, because that is the one that deletes data rather than cache.
Inside a container
Open a container and you get its live CPU, memory and network stats, along with five tabs:
- Logs, streamed as they are written.
- Terminal, a real interactive shell inside the container.
- Files, a browser for the container's filesystem, with copy in and out.
- Changes, a diff of everything written since the image was built, which is usually the fastest way to see what a container actually did.
- Inspect, the full engine-level detail.
Terminal and Files need the container to be running, so they step aside for Logs when it stops.
What Panda can do with it
With Docker enabled, the same operations are available to Panda as tools, so "why did the api container restart?" turns into it reading the logs, checking the events, and inspecting the container instead of asking you to paste output.
It covers listing and inspecting every resource type, logs, stats, processes and filesystem changes, exec and file copy, pulling, building, tagging and running images, compose logs, creating volumes and networks, and the removal and prune operations. Anything destructive goes through your normal permission prompts, and the app's Actions toggle in Settings turns the whole tool surface off without hiding the tab.
If you run with a Limited execution environment, enable its Docker access preset so the harness can reach the socket and ~/.docker.