5 Docker Containers for Devs

The task is small. A JWT needs decoding, a log field is Base64 inside gzip inside hex, or a client sent a HEIC screenshot and the ticket wants a PNG. The fastest route is the third search result, a utility site with a paste box and an ad banner. That is where the token, the log line, and the screenshot end up. Nobody planned to hand internal data to a stranger's web server. It happened because the alternative was fifteen minutes of setup for a five-second job.

Five containers close that gap. Each one is a small local service that does a recurring developer chore on your own machine: inspect, transform, convert, test, and diagram. None of them is AI infrastructure, and none overlaps with the agentic developer containers KDnuggets covered earlier. Boring utilities are the point here.

1. IT-Tools: The Everyday Dev Toolbox

IT-Tools is a single web app holding the small utilities developers otherwise search for one at a time: JSON formatting and comparison, JWT decoding, Base64 in both directions, hash generation, UUIDs, regex testing, cron expression helpers, and color and date converters. The self-host route is one command:

docker run -d --name it-tools --restart unless-stopped -p 8080:80 corentinth/it-tools:latest

Open localhost:8080 and the whole grab bag is there, on a machine you control — and that is the entire pitch. Nothing about IT-Tools is clever, and it doesn't need to be, because the problem it fixes is a browser history full of decoder sites. Treat it as a convenience layer, though. Nothing you paste into it is stored with any care, so it is not a vault for secrets, and decoding a token there tells you what the token says about itself, not whether your server would accept it.