Painless Docker - 2nd Edition

Docker CLI

The Docker Command Line Interface, commonly referred to as the Docker CLI, is the primary human-facing entry point to the Docker ecosystem. It's designed to provide a consistent, discoverable, and scriptable interface for interacting with Docker, regardless of whether Docker is running locally, on a remote host, or inside a virtualized environment such as Docker Desktop.

At its core, the Docker CLI is a thin client. It doesn't create containers, manage images, or interact with Linux kernel features directly. Instead, it translates user intent expressed through commands into API calls sent to the Docker Engine. By default, this communication happens over a local Unix socket, but it can just as easily target a remote Docker daemon over TCP or SSH.