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Visual Feast

Why SwarmCLI?

In the Kubernetes world, k9s is the gold standard for cluster management. We believe Docker Swarm users deserve the same level of quality, speed, and intuition.

"Because Swarm is not dead, it's just efficient. And it deserves better tools."

SwarmCLI translates the complexity of Docker Swarm into a sleek, keyboard-centric terminal UI. It’s built for developers who want to manage their clusters without leaving the terminal or waiting for heavy Web UIs to load.

Quickstart

Get up and running in seconds:

# macOS/Linux via Homebrew
brew tap eldara-tech/tap
brew install swarmcli

# Run it
swarmcli

Features

• Real-time Observability: Live monitoring of Services, Tasks, Nodes, and Containers.
• Stack Awareness: Navigate your cluster hierarchically (Stacks > Services > Tasks).
• Instant Logs: No more docker service logs -f. Just press l on any service.
• Secrets & Configs: Manage, rotate, and — with Business Edition — reveal secrets for debugging.
• Management Actions: Scale, restart, remove, and update services with single keystrokes.
• Zero Config: Works out-of-the-box with your local Docker engine or remote via SSH/Contexts.
• Lightweight: Built with Go. Single static binary (< 20MB). Zero dependencies.

Business Edition

The Community Edition is the full open-source TUI. Business Edition is a commercial superset that adds:

• :bootstrap — one-command deploy of an mTLS-fronted RBAC proxy and per-node agent stack onto your existing Swarm.
• Per-user RBAC, identity by client certificate, role-gated mutation and exec.
• Interactive shell into a running service task.
• Reveal-secret for debugging.

Installs via brew install Eldara-Tech/tap/swarmcli-be, scoop install swarmcli-be, or docker pull eldaratech/swarmcli-be. The binary on disk is named swarmcli (BE is a strict superset of CE — same binary name, expanded feature set), so existing scripts and aliases continue to work.

Documentation, install channels, and license sign-up are at the BE release repo: Eldara-Tech/swarmcli-be-releases.

Installation

Build from Source

git clone https://github.com/Eldara-Tech/swarmcli.git
cd swarmcli
go install

Using Docker container to build and run locally

docker build -t swarmcli-dev .
docker run --rm -it -v "$PWD":/app -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock  -w /app swarmcli-dev

or with docker compose:

docker compose run --build --rm swarmcli

Then run:

go run .

Logging

# Production (default)
$ go run .
# → writes JSON logs to  ~/.local/state/swarmcli/app.log

# Development
$ SWARMCLI_ENV=dev go run .
# → writes pretty logs to ~/.local/state/swarmcli/app-debug.log

# Optional: control verbosity
$ LOG_LEVEL=debug SWARMCLI_ENV=dev go run .

Environment variables

• SWARMCLI_ENV: dev enables pretty debug logs (default is prod).
• LOG_LEVEL: debug, info, warn, error, …
• SWARMCLI_DISABLE_VERSION_CHECK=true: disables the startup request to https://swarmcli.io/api/v1/version that checks whether a newer release is available.

On startup, SwarmCLI checks for a newer release by sending the current version and edition to https://swarmcli.io/api/v1/version. Set SWARMCLI_DISABLE_VERSION_CHECK=true to opt out.

Colorize log tails. Not perfect but simple:

sudo apt install ccze
tail -f ~/.local/state/swarmcli/app-debug.log | ccze -A

Integration tests

The logs for the integration tests can be enabled with:

TEST_LOG=1 ./test-setup/testenv.sh test

Key Bindings

Key	Action
?	Show Help / Cheat Sheet
:stack	Navigate to Stacks
:svc	Navigate to Services
:node	Navigate to Nodes
:config	Navigate to Config
:secret	Navigate to Secret
:node	Navigate to Nodes
l	View Logs
s	Scale Service
r	Restart Service
ctrl-c	Quit

Project Hygiene

Impeccable project hygiene is the backbone of a thriving ecosystem.

• Contributing: We ❤️ contributions! Check our guide to get started.
• Security: Found a bug? Let us know securely.
• Code of Conduct: Expectations for our community.
• License: Apache 2.0.

Releasing

Releases are fully automated — no manual version file to update. The git tag is the single source of truth.

git tag v1.5.0
git push origin v1.5.0

Pushing a v* tag triggers the release workflow which:

1. Injects the tag into the binary via GoReleaser ldflags (-X main.version=1.5.0)
2. Builds for Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD (multiple architectures)
3. Publishes a GitHub release with auto-generated changelog
4. Pushes multi-arch Docker images to Docker Hub
5. Updates the Homebrew tap and Scoop bucket

The in-app Version: header reads from the injected value. Local builds without GoReleaser show dev.

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