How do I run celery status/flower without the -A option?
The -A option is the one that passes the celery instance with related configuration including the package containing your tasks.
To use all the features flowers needs to be configured like a worker, this means knowing the package where your celery tasks are and knowing them.
Add to your docker container the needed python lib shouldn't be that hard, for example you could add to this file the configuration line CELERY_IMPORTS in the following way:
CELERY_IMPORTS = os.getenv('CELERY_IMPORTS ', 'default.package') UPDATE
As @asksol, celery creator, pointed out in the comments here's a more detailed explanation of why you need the -A option:
Flower is also a message consumer and so will help recover unacked messages. Since you have a custom visibility defined, starting flower unconfigured means it will use the default visibility timeout and thus will redeliver unacked messages faster than your workers. Always use -A so that worker, flower and client configuration is in sync