dockerrun is a dead simple Python library for running Docker commands. It does the thing you normally want to do with minimal hassle.
It works a bit like this:
>>> import dockerrun
>>> client = dockerrun.from_env()
>>> client.run("ubuntu", "echo hello world")
'hello world\n'
>>> client.run("ubuntu", "cat missing")
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "dockerrun/client.py", line 54, in run
self.logs(container, stdout=False, stderr=True)
dockerrun.client.ProcessError: Command 'cat missing' in image 'ubuntu' returned non-zero exit status 1: cat: missing: No such file or directory
>>> client.run("myapp", "tasks/reticulate-splines", detach=True)
{'Id': 'ee2b9f3c6d75fc309b114b5a021bfaa0b35cb807a1af036d256d8deff503f5ba', 'Warnings': None}