📖 Your First 5 Minutes with cella
This tutorial walks you through installing cella, launching it, and performing basic container operations.
Prerequisites
- A Linux host with LXD or Docker (or both) installed
- At least one container or Docker container already running (or we'll create one)
sudo access (or membership in the lxd / docker group)
Step 1: Get the Binary
curl -Lo cella https://github.com/fourdollars/cella/releases/download/latest/cella_linux_amd64
chmod +x cella
Or build from source (requires Go 1.20+):
git clone https://github.com/fourdollars/cella
cd cella
go build -o cella ./cmd/main.go
Step 2: Launch cella
sudo ./cella
You'll see the Dashboard — a split-pane view with your container list on the left and real-time metrics on the right.
💡 cella auto-detects both LXD and Docker runtimes. If you have both, all containers appear in a unified list.
Step 3: Navigate
- ↑ / ↓ (or k / j) — Move between containers
- s — Start a stopped container
- x — Stop a running container
- e — Open an interactive shell (exec) in the selected container
- ? — Show the full help overlay with all key bindings
Step 4: Watch the Metrics
The Dashboard shows live sparklines for CPU, memory, and network I/O. These update every second from cgroup v2 stats.
- Select a container and watch its sparkline graph build up
- Press r to open the Resources panel for detailed CPU/memory with live-editable limits
Step 5: Sort and Filter
- 1 — Sort by name
- 2 — Sort by status
- 3 — Sort by CPU usage
- f — Cycle runtime filter: All → LXD → Docker → All
Step 6: Quit
Press q or Ctrl+C to exit.
What's Next?