Features

This page lists everything LogDeck does, grouped by area. LogDeck is a self-hosted log viewer, alerting tool, and control panel for Docker and Podman, and each section links to its full guide where one exists.

Real-time log streaming

Container logs stream to the browser over a WebSocket as they are written.

Live log streaming with automatic updates
Auto-scroll toggle for following new lines
Configurable tail size, and pause with a count of buffered lines
Timestamps you can show or hide
Both stdout and stderr streams

Log persistence and history

LogDeck stores logs locally, so the history outlives the container that wrote it.

LogDeck tails every container on every host into a local SQLite store, enabled by default
A Live | History toggle in the log viewer searches everything stored, on the server
History survives restarts, and rebuilds that give a container a new ID, such as docker compose up --build
Containers that no longer exist appear under a Removed filter, with their stored logs still readable
Retention caps evict the oldest lines first, at 50 MB per container and 1024 MB in total by default
Search every container's stored logs at once, merged by time, or one Compose stack's

Read the guide

Alerting

LogDeck tells you when a container dies, gets OOM-killed, fails its health check, or starts logging errors.

Event rules on container death with a non-zero exit, OOM kills, and unhealthy health checks
Log rules on a minimum level, a regex pattern, or both
Rate thresholds such as "5 matches in 60 seconds", and per-rule cooldowns that report how many matches they suppressed
Rules can target hosts, container names, or Compose projects
Notification channels: a generic JSON webhook that Slack and Discord accept unchanged, ntfy, Gotify, and Telegram
Alert history with the delivery result of every notification

Read the guide

Filtering and search

Search and filters narrow a log view down to the lines you need.

Full-text search with match navigation, in highlight or exclude mode
Log level filter: TRACE, DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR, FATAL, PANIC, and unclassified lines
Regex matching
Time range presets and a custom calendar range
Color-coded log levels, collapsible JSON lines, and line pinning

Log export

Download container logs for offline analysis or to archive them.

Download the filtered view as JSON or TXT
Works in both Live and History mode
Keeps timestamps and log levels
Copy single lines or a multi-line selection to the clipboard

Container discovery

LogDeck finds every container on your hosts and keeps its status current.

Status updates driven by the engine's event stream
Container details: name, image, status, and uptime
Health badges (healthy, unhealthy, starting) for containers with a healthcheck, on Docker only, see engine support
Host information: engine version and container count
System resource usage: CPU and memory
Grouping by Compose project

Multi-host management

One LogDeck dashboard works across many hosts and keeps every action scoped to the right daemon.

Connect local sockets, remote TCP endpoints, or SSH hosts with DOCKER_HOSTS
One container list, with host badges that show where each container runs
Lifecycle actions, environment variable edits, and log streaming all go to the container's own host
With no hosts configured, LogDeck auto-detects a local Docker or Podman socket

Container management

Start, stop, and inspect containers from the UI.

Start, stop, and restart containers
Remove containers, with a confirmation step
Detailed container information
Environment variables, mounted volumes, exposed ports, labels, and metadata

Environment variable management

View and change a container's environment variables from the UI.

Display all environment variables
Add, edit, and delete variables. Saving recreates standalone containers
Bulk import from a .env file for direct container edits
Coolify applications and services read and save their environment in Coolify, then offer a separate deployment request. Saved variable settings and preview scopes are preserved
Dokploy applications and Compose deployments edit saved environment text after ownership confirmation, preserve related settings, and deploy separately. Compose variables follow the Compose file's references or env_file; preview and database edits stay in Dokploy
LogDeck detects Coolify-managed containers and labels them in the UI
Works with Docker Compose setups

Compose stack tools

Act on a whole Compose stack instead of one container at a time.

Start, stop, or restart every container in a stack from its group header
Aggregated stack logs merge all of a stack's containers into one stream, ordered by timestamp
Color-coded container badges show which container wrote each line
Works with Docker Compose and podman-compose projects

Stats and trends

Live resource usage with a short history, across all your hosts.

Live CPU and memory readings per container
Sparklines covering the last five minutes
Per-host engine stats in multi-host setups: CPUs, memory, container counts, and version
System stats for the machine running LogDeck

Resource limits and restart policies

Change container resources without recreating or restarting anything.

Edit memory limits, CPU limits, and restart policies from the container page
LogDeck applies changes live through the engine's update API, so there is no downtime
Human-friendly inputs such as 512m and 1g, with validation
Blocked in read-only mode

Images, volumes, and networks

See what else lives on your hosts besides containers.

Read-only listings of images, volumes, and networks
Aggregated across all configured hosts
Text filtering and per-host error reporting

Command-line interface

The logdeck CLI talks to the server's HTTP API and is built for scripts and AI agents.

List containers and stacks, inspect containers, read, follow, and search logs, and check stats from the terminal
logdeck grep searches the recent logs of every running container across all hosts
Lifecycle actions, resource limits, and Compose stack controls
logdeck alerts manages alert rules, notification channels, and alert history
logdeck login saves named contexts, kubectl-style
Table output for people, and JSON or NDJSON output (-o json) for machines

Read the guide

MCP server

logdeck mcp lets an AI assistant query and manage your containers over the Model Context Protocol.

A stdio MCP server for Claude Desktop, Cursor, Claude Code, and other clients
Read tools for containers, logs, cross-container search, events, stats, and stored history
Action tools for lifecycle, removal, one-shot exec, environment variables, and settings
The API token decides what it can do, with no flags to configure. A read-scoped token cannot change anything, and an admin token has the same reach it has in the UI
Uses the same HTTP API as the web UI and CLI, so there is no new server and no new auth

Read the guide

Web terminal

Open a real shell in any running container from the browser.

Terminal access over WebSocket
Full terminal emulation with XTerm.js
10,000 lines of scrollback
Copy to clipboard

Scoped API tokens

The CLI and other tools get their own credentials, so nobody has to share your login.

Create and revoke tokens under Settings > API Access
Tokens start with ldk_ and are shown only once, at creation
Two scopes: admin for full access and read for read-only
A read token cannot change anything, open the web terminal, read container environment variables, read settings, or read alert rules, channels, and history
Sent as an Authorization: Bearer header on the HTTP API
Work alongside the JWT sessions the web UI uses

Read the guide

Optional authentication

Protect a LogDeck instance with a login, or run it open.

JWT-based login with a 7-day session token
Enable it from the Settings page, or pin it with environment variables
Environment-configured passwords are bcrypt hashes
Rate-limited login endpoint
Can be turned off entirely

Read-only mode

Read-only mode stops LogDeck from changing your containers, while you keep reading their logs.

Blocks starting, stopping, restarting, and removing containers
Blocks Compose stack actions, environment and resource edits, and the web terminal
Toggle it from the Settings page, or pin it with the READONLY_MODE environment variable

Read the guide

Interface

Dark and light mode, following your system preference, with a manual toggle
Responsive layout for desktop, tablet, and mobile
Toast notifications that confirm actions
Keyboard shortcuts, with a cheat sheet on ?
Virtualized log lists that handle thousands of lines without slowing down

Engine support and caveats

LogDeck talks to Podman through its Docker-compatible API socket, rootless or rootful, and can mix Docker and Podman hosts in one multi-host setup. It auto-detects local sockets in this order: Docker, then rootless Podman, then rootful Podman.

Health badges are Docker-only. LogDeck reads a container's health from the engine's container list. Docker includes it there, but Podman's Docker-compatible list API does not, so containers on a Podman host show no health badge even when they define a healthcheck. Everything else works the same on both engines.

Technical details

The web frontend is embedded in the Go server binary, so there is one binary to deploy.
There is no external database. The config file, the SQLite log store, and the alert history all live in one directory, /data by default. Mount it as a volume and there is nothing else to manage.
LogDeck is open source under the GPL-3.0 license.

Have a feature request? Open an issue on GitHub.