DockerClient can be used to do something on Docker, such as list, start or stop containers. If you are not familar with the DockerClient, check out my article Python (Scripting) - Getting Started with DockerClient.

Here is the minimal boilerplate code without any error handling to list all of the Docker containers on your system.

#!/usr/bin/python3
import docker
client = docker.DockerClient(base_url='unix:///var/run/docker.sock')
containers = client.containers.list(all=True)
for container in containers:
  print(container.name)
  print(container.status)

Here is a more practical example, with try/except/else error handling.

#!/usr/bin/python3
import docker
import sys

try:
    client = docker.DockerClient(base_url='unix:///var/run/docker.sock')
except Exception as exception:
    print(exception)
    sys.exit(1)

try:
    containers = client.containers.list(all=True)
except Exception as exception:
    print(exception)
    sys.exit(1)


for container in containers:
    try:
        container.status
    except Exception as exception:
        print(exception)
        sys.exit(1)
    else:
        if container.status != "running":
            print(f"Docker container {container.name}is NOT running")
        else:
            print(f"Docker container {container.name} is running")
sys.exit(0)