Basic Docker Commands


Basic Docker Commands

(Updated: )
Docker
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Before this, I explained here, what is Docker, what is a container and why we are using it. I skip to installation because docker installation has differences in each operating system. You can follow the official installation document from here

INFO Commands

When you did to installation successfully, we can start to use docker. Open terminal or PowerShell and write these lines.

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docker version

This command will give you information about the version of your system and docker engine.

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Client: Docker Engine - Community
 Version:           19.03.8
 API version:       1.40
 Go version:        go1.12.17
 Git commit:        afacb8b
 Built:             Wed Mar 11 01:21:11 2020
 OS/Arch:           darwin/amd64
 Experimental:      false

Server: Docker Engine - Community
 Engine:
  Version:          19.03.8
  API version:      1.40 (minimum version 1.12)
  Go version:       go1.12.17
  Git commit:       afacb8b
  Built:            Wed Mar 11 01:29:16 2020
  OS/Arch:          linux/amd64
  Experimental:     false
 containerd:
  Version:          v1.2.13
  GitCommit:        7ad184331fa3e55e52b890ea95e65ba581ae3429
 runc:
  Version:          1.0.0-rc10
  GitCommit:        dc9208a3303feef5b3839f4323d9beb36df0a9dd
 docker-init:
  Version:          0.18.0
  GitCommit:        fec3683

Another info command is “docker info” shows you informations about configuration values for engine 

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docker info

But what about if we write only “docker”.When we type to terminal or PowerShell only “docker” it prints to us an informative explanation about docker management commands, commands and their options.

Simply we manage docker image and container like that

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docker <command> <sub-command>

For instance, if we want to run a container we need to write

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docker container run

also, we can use this without command, but this is naming as an old way now.

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docker run

Container Management Commands

Container management command for creation, deletion start and stop for container.To explain that i choose to create nginx container.

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docker container run --publish 80:80 --detach  --name webhost nginx

** –detach or -d option runs container in the background.

With this command Docker doing

  • Pulling the image of nginx from docker hub if not exist locally
  • Creates new container based of that image
  • Gives a virtual ip on a private network inside docker engine
  • Reserve port 80 from the host machine and forwards to port 80 in container
  • Starts container

After container created , you can list all working containers , you should see your container as up and running

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docker container ls // or docker ps (old way)

with -a flag you can list stopped container also.

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docker container ls -a

If you want to learn details of your container configs , inspect command prints it as json 

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docker container inspect webhost

If we want to stop our container just need to write a command below with our container name.Remember , our container name was webhost.(When you don’t give a name a container , docker gives a random name for it.BTW, you can also use first 3 digits of your container id instead of name)

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docker container stop webhost

To re-run stopped container we change stop as start .

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docker container start webhost

And lastly when we want to remove docker container , we use to ‘rm’ command.Before remove a container , you need to stop it.Docker gives a warning to prevent deletion of working containers like above.

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docker container rm webhost

Logs and Tasks Management

If we used –detach and -d , still we can reach logs of the running container

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docker container logs webhost

and for the process list in one container.

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docker container top <containername>

And todays last command coming for to reach performance stats for all containers

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docker container stats

Credits:

Owner of Thumbnail Image : Astrid Westvang