helper-scripts

A collection of utility scripts to streamline local development workflows.
This repo currently includes pview—a clean, formatted terminal viewer for Podman containers.

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📦 pview: Pretty podman ps Output

pview is a lightweight wrapper that formats podman ps output using Python and the Rich library.

Instead of messy default output, you'll get a colorized, readable table of containers showing:

• Container ID
• Name
• Image
• Status
• Ports
• Created time

✨ Sample Output

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ ID           ┃ Name            ┃ Image                          ┃ Status    ┃ Ports ┃ Created    ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│ b1a88bb96a7e │ admiring_liskov │ localhost/mcp/puppeteer:latest │ Up 4 days │ -     │ 4 days ago │
└──────────────┴─────────────────┴────────────────────────────────┴───────────┴───────┴────────────┘

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⚙️ Setup

1. Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/helper-scripts.git
cd helper-scripts

2. Set up the virtual environment

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install rich

3. Run the tool

./run_podman_view.sh

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⌨️ Optional: Create an alias

To run pview from anywhere, add this to your ~/.zshrc (or ~/.bashrc):

alias pview="$HOME/git/helper-scripts/run_podman_view.sh"

Then reload your shell:

source ~/.zshrc

Now just type:

pview

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📝 Scripts

• rich_podman_ps.py: Collects and formats podman ps JSON data using Rich.
• run_podman_view.sh: Activates the virtual environment and runs the script.
• venv/: Your local Python virtual environment (optional to commit).

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📋 Requirements

• macOS or Linux
• Python 3.7+
• Podman installed and working (podman ps --format json)
• Rich (pip install rich)

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🪪 License

MIT License

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Built by Jonathan Gardner