We have been using the Docker command line or PowerShell to control containers, images or networks but there are few scenarios where you might want to integrate container operations into an existing application or build a custom client like a mobile application or chatbot to manage containers running in your environment. Integrating docker management tasks into a custom application using commands is a tedious task, so to solve this problem Docker offers a REST API called Docker Engine API.
A REST API stands for Representational State Transfer (REST). It is one way of providing interoperability among different services. RESTful services use HTTP/HTTPs to communicate with the service using operations mapped to HTTP actions like GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and so on. The Docker engine API allows you to control every aspect of Docker from within your application. The Docker API client can be written in any language which can make a REST call like C#, Java, Go, Perl, JavaScript, Python...