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Hi, I am new to Docker and using Docker desktop in Windows 10, to run a wiki js container, It works fine.
So I now want to download and install an image of Owncloud. Owncloud provides these instructions:
docker pull owncloud/server
Although I’ve read some Docker documentation and understand from it that a CLI is available in Docker Desktop, I have been unable to find a CLI.
Any help would be much appreciated.
thanks,
Paul
Can you describe how you tried to find it?
I did quite a few things.:
1 - having installed docker desktop, I explored all the options I could find in the UI, including settings
2 - Watched a yoube vid by a third party, but it din’t help because it didn’t explore finding the CLI through docker desktop
3 - Read the Docker documentation
4 - Read the own cloud documentation regarding installing own cloud using docker.
So although from the information I’ve found it seems the CLI is available through Docker Desktop UI. I have not been able to find it.
I ran a windows Command Prompt in admin mode and changed to the programdata\dockerdesktop folder and ran
docker pull owncloud/server
from there and that worked.
thanks for help,
Paul
I have no idea if the UI provides a way to access the CLI, at least I haven’t seen one, and it wouldn’t be the place where I would expect to find a CLI tool.
In general command line interface tools are meant to be used in a terminal (or in a script). The command prompt is such a terminal, so is Powershell, or if your installed git the git-bash shell. The docker CLI will be available through the PATH environment variable and therefor work in every terminal without having to navigate to any folder.
If you would enable the Docker Desktop WSL2 integration for a WSL2 distribution, even there the docker cli would be injected and available.
Thanks for the reply. It seems the Docker documentation needs updtating. it states there’s a CLI accessible from Docker Desktop and as far as I can see, there isn’t one accessible from the Desktop UI. I have the current version installed.
I’ll have a look at WSL2. I’m just trying to set up owncloud and hoped Docker would have a templated approach which would make it easy.
Can you share an url to the docs that indicates the cli is accessible from Docker Desktop?
It is installed/provided by Docker Desktop.
I just mentioned WSL2 because some people run Linux WSL2 distributions and want to interact with docker without having to install it as well. Docker Desktop for Windows runns the Docker engine as a WSL2 distribution on the WSL2 utility vm - though those details are abstracted away from the user, who only needs to use the UI or CLI for interaction.
It wouldn’t make sense to include the CLI in a GUI. Since Docker Desktop runs everything in a virtual machine, it could have been a way to make the CLI available on a tab which opens a command line in the virtual machine, but the point of Docker Desktop is allowing you to use the docker commands (almost) the same way as on Linux without the Desktop and tries to hide the fact that there is a virtual machine.
So no, the CLI directly is not available in Docker Desktop’s GUI, but there is a search box at the top of the Window where you can search for images and pull them.
click on the search field and you will see this:
You will still need the command line, since it would be pretty hard to make all the command line features available in the GUI so there are only some parameters that you can pass when you start a container from the GUI.
Maybe you are confused by the fact that you can open a shell in a container, but that is not a shell for the command line.
thanks, as a git CLI user, I agree. I am just giving feedback on the docker documentation.
we can close this now 
Thank you for your feedback, however, it is hard to fix a documentation, if the feedback doesn’t share where the error is in the docs
Please, share the URL @meyay asked for
Yes, Its there on the UI. So, when you click on ‘Exec’, on the right pane in the same line as Exec you’ll see a Open in external terminal link. My system is Mac OS. not sure if same is for Windows
Can you share your thought about how opening a terminal in a container helps with accessing the docker cli?
You probably missed that despite the first post the real question was not about opening a terminal in a container.
And if I click here, I get these two entries: clicking on one or the other doesn’t happen.
That feature came in Docker Desktop 4.32 on 2024-07-04 , but thank you for adding it to the topic.
Sorry, I’m new to the topic (I installed Docker Desktop 2 days ago for the first time :'-D): I landed on this thread just after noticing this feature (which I know only now has been added very recently)
