Rudder: The Simplest Way to Navigate Your Docker-Compose Commands

If you’ve worked with Docker Compose long enough, you’ve probably run into this pain:

They’re not hard, but they’re long. And remembering every flag or service name? That gets annoying — especially in teams or large projects.

Meet Rudder — a tiny but powerful CLI tool that helps you map complex Docker Compose commands into clean, memorable aliases. One config file, one consistent interface, no more typing the same boilerplate over and over.

Rudder is a command-line interface that lets you define aliases for common Docker Compose commands via a simple YAML config. Instead of repeating long commands, you can run clean shortcuts like:

Each alias maps to a full docker-compose command under the hood. Think of it as a command map — your team’s cheat sheet made executable, you can also define an alias to make it even shorter, in my project I called it zen.

• ✅ Simplify Dev Onboarding: New developers can run the right container commands without memorizing anything
• ✅ Avoid Repetition: Define once, reuse everywhere
• ✅ Better Consistency: No more differences between how Alice and Bob run your dev stack
• ✅ Fully Local: No daemons, no cloud, no nonsense — just a YAML and some shell magic
• ✅ Easy to Share: Commit the config with your repo

If you’ve ever typed docker-compose exec 30 times a day, Rudder is your new best friend.

A rudder helps steer a ship — just like this tool helps steer your development workflow. It’s small, but it changes everything about the direction and feel of how you operate your containers.

If you use Docker Compose daily and want a cleaner, faster, more shareable way to manage commands, give Rudder a try. It’s small, focused, and designed to get out of your way — just like a good CLI should.

👉 Check out the repo on GitHub
⭐ Star it if you find it helpful, and feel free to contribute!