the-moby-effect

Moby API client and CLI client built using effect-ts. If you want documentation, please consider reading The Docker API documentation, it is very well written and there is nothing in this library that wouldn't be in there (plus I would just do a worse job if I tried to write my interpretation of their documentation here). If you are just looking for some examples to get your feet underneath you quickly with effect integration, then I do have some of those here.

Motivation/ideation 💡

The motivation for this project come from working with dockerode and I became frustrated with the incorrect types sometimes and the error handling - I did not want to wrap every docker call in a try/catch. Those are the two main reasons why I build the-moby-effect with effect-ts. I also wanted to see if I could build a moby api client that could be used in a web/frontend environment.

Goals ✅

• - local unix socket connections
• - http and https connections
• - ssh connections
• - DOCKER_HOST environment variable support
• - streaming, multiplexing, and connection hijacking (just like dockerode, streams are passed directly through to you)
• - tests, examples, and in-line JSDoc comments based on the moby api documentation
• - Strong focus on types and typescript support
• - support multiple environments: NodeJs, Bun, Deno, and Web are all supported
• - Support multiple "engines" (docker, podman, ect). If its built on top of moby then it should just work, however, currently only docker is tested against
• - Implement all common docker commands except for login/logout because I don't want to interact with credential helpers

Non-Goals 🗑️

• Version negotiating: either install a specific version for the moby api that you are targeting or just keep your docker install somewhat up-to-date and you should have no problems

WIP/Todo 🚧

• Add more examples
• Finish implementing all common docker commands
• Maybe add tests against something else other than docker like podman?
• Different layers for podman, docker, ect

Blocked 🚑

DockerCompose support. Blocked only because I have no idea where to even start on this. I'm confident it just reuses the moby api's so there are no new api's, but that means I have to rewrite the docker-compose go plugin in TS which I'm not too thrilled about. It's not something that I directly need though, so thats also why I am not too interested in supporting this.

Compatibility 🔐

the-moby-effect targets the current stable version of the moby api, which is v1.43 at the time of writing. If you are curious what that translates to for docker versions then take a look at this api version matrix published by Docker. As stated in the api version matrix, only Docker v24.0 would be officially supported by the-moby-effect, however, we still test against docker v20, v23, v24, and the next release candidate which is v25 (there is no v21 or v22 btw). Here is another note from Docker:

"The Docker daemon and client don't necessarily need to be the same version at all times. However, keep the following in mind":

1. "If the daemon is newer than the client, the client doesn't know about new features or deprecated API endpoints in the daemon" (shouldn't really happen because the-moby-effect will always target the latest stable api version)
2. "If the client is newer than the daemon, the client can request API endpoints that the daemon doesn't know about" (this could happen, although most of the endpoints are pretty stable at this point so its more like an endpoint parameter might change).

The only compatibility issue found so far is that when using the-moby-effect with docker v20 you can not filter or prune volumes using the all filter as it was not present at the time. Other than that all functionality appears to still work.

Notes 📝

If you want to use the-moby-effect in a web environment or with the undici agent layer, you can not use the containerAttach or the execStart (with Detach false) endpoints as both will attempt to reuse the tcp socket from the http request which will not be available in those layers. To use those endpoints, you must be using the Node/Bun/Deno agent layer. Alternatively, if you need to attach to containers in a web environment, you could use the containerAttachWs endpoint to achieve similar features over a websocket instead. However, the demux helpers only accept sockets right now, so you may need to adapt the demux helpers how you see fit to accept a websocket as well.

Versioning 🚨

This package does not follow semantic versioning, instead the major and minor part represents the version of the moby api. All bugfixes, breaking or otherwise, will be released under an incremented patch version.

Library docs 🗃️

https://leonitousconforti.github.io/the-moby-effect/

Contributing and getting help 💬 🍻

Contributions, suggestions, and questions are welcome! If you are interested in developing, my recommendation is going to be to use the Devcontainer (even if you don't like them) as it has everything setup already to run the tests or to just let Github actions run the tests. I'll review prs and respond to issues/discussion here on GitHub but if you want more synchronous communication you can find me in the effect discord as @leonitous