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Running Docker containers

In this short article I’ll discuss about how you can run containers with Docker.

Docker offers an easy way to search and run container images on your servers. You can simply execute docker search name to search for a particular application, just like in the following example: docker search httpd

docker apache image

As you can see from the image above, we’ve searched for apache images that are available on the docker hub website. On this website you can find all sorts of images that are built by different contributors to the docker community. You can create an account yourself and build/upload/download docker images from the hub. For this article I’m going to use images directly from the hub.

For the following example I’m going to search for a centos image which I’m going to run it on my current host. So once you’ve executed docker search centos, you can then run the following command to launch the container: docker run docker.io/centos

Because we’ve simply used the run command, the docker image will be downloaded but no actual output will be shown. With the run command we can also append commands to our docker images just like in the following example:

run docker.io/centos ls -al /

docker centos image

This is the container’s file system, as you can see it’s completely isolated from your machine’s file system. Whatever docker image you run, that specific container will only be executed in your opened terminal so it will close if you exit the terminal or end the process. Docker supports the so called detach method in which you can run containers and let them execute in background (or so called detached). This result can be easily achieved by executing docker run command with the -d parameter:

docker run -d docker.io/centos

I’ve not chosen the best image for this example because the container will be executed then it will close. In this case I can run the following command to make sure that my container will not end its process once it’s executed: docker run -d docker.io/centos sleep infinity

You can visualize the running containers by executing the docker ps command:

docker containers

Note that a unique container ID has been automatically assigned to our newly created container so any future interaction with the container will be made by referencing its ID.

As you can see, because I’ve used a public available image, the name of the container is set by the image author. We can change this behavior and start an image with a custom name. For now let’s stop our container by running docker stop ID just like in the following example: docker stop 424c8d3a61ce

We can verify again that the container has been stopped:

how to check docker processes

To assign a custom name to a container use the docker run command with the –name parameter: docker run -d –name ittrainingday docker.io/centos sleep infinity

This is very useful if you are running multiple containers from the same docker image so make sure you assign a unique name to each container instance.

You can start/stop/pause/restart docker containers whenever it’s needed simply by using the docker action container_name_or_id command. Note that docker command supports multiple actions and parameters so make sure to check its manpage or much easier, by using docker –help.

There are many other features available with docker, I’ll try to cover some of them in future articles. Since I’m still at the beginning with this technology, any input from your is more than helpful. So please post any comments/questions in the dedicated section and I’ll try to respond as soon as possible. Wish you all the best!




This post first appeared on ITtrainingday | It's All About IT And Much More…, please read the originial post: here

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Running Docker containers

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