Now that I have docker installed on my Ubuntu server (see http://www.whiteboardcoder.com/2017/04/installing-docker-on-ubuntu-1604.html [1] ) I am going to go over how to pull down images from dockerhub.

What is docker hub?

It’s the default docker registry service used by the docker tool to pull docker images from. You can also push images up to it but I will not be covering that in this article.

Download images

First I am going to download and run an nginx docker image on my machine.

First pull down the image to your local machine.

> sudo docker pull nginx

It will quickly download the 'latest' docker image for nginx (latest does not mean cutting edge it just means the image the nginx team has tagged with 'latest')

Pull down another image

> sudo docker pull postgres

Display images

List the all the images you have downloaded

> sudo docker images

Here you can see the nginx and postgres images listed there. (and any other images you may have downloaded in the past)

You can think of these docker images in the same way as you think of virtual machine images or cloud images. They are just the image they are not a running container (or to use a virtual machine terminology they are not running instances)

You can use these images to spawn docker containers. (To use virtual machine terminology spawn in instance)

Let me create an nginx container

> sudo docker run -p 8080:80 nginx

The -p argument allows you to pass the local port 8080 and connect it to the port 80 in the container. In this case the nginx on the container listens on its port 80. If you do not do this the container cannot be accessed via its port.

OK … now what.

It looks like it's doing nothing. Open another terminal and let's examine what it is doing.

In the new terminal run this command.

> sudo docker ps

There it is you can see that it is running and that it has attached local port 8080 to the containers port of 80.

Now if I run a simple curl test to try and hit the nginx server.

> curl localhost:8080

I can see I get back a web page.

But also if I look back at the running image I can see the log output.

Curl a few more times to see the log outputs to the command line in the docker container.

This is a very typical setup for a docker container. Where the image sends output to STDOUT and STDERR instead of a log file.

How do we stop this container ?

How do we stop the running container? Well, in this particular case its very easy. We are running interactively so just press ctrl+c to cancel running it, which effectively stops it

Now check if it's running

> sudo docker ps

Now, just because it's not running does not mean it does not exist. In truth the container is still there just shut off.

To view all running and non-running containers run this command.

> sudo docker ps -a

There it is with a status of exited. (And has an exit status of 0)

Starting a container in a detached state

Run this command to start up an nginx container in a detached state.

> sudo docker run -d -p 8080:80 nginx

When you do this you will get back a UUID of the new container.

If I check for running containers

> sudo docker ps

I can see it running and that the IDs match.

You can test it by running a curl command

> curl localhost:8080

To stop this container you need one of two things. The name of the running container

In my case I have an auto-generated name "unruffled_gates" Or you need enough of the UUID to be unique (compared to other running docker containers on the server)

Once you have one of those you can run a command like this (of course replace the container name with your container name)

> sudo docker stop unruffled_gates

Now check it

> sudo docker ps

Stopped containers ?

When you killed the docker container all you really did was shut it down. The specific container still exists.

Run this command it will list all container, running and stopped.

> sudo docker ps -a

There you can see the two containers that have been created so far and that they are both have a status of "Exited". You can see they both exited with a status of 0.

How do you restart a stopped container?

I have two containers that are both in an Exited (stopped) state. To start one of them up I need one of two things. I either need their assigned name or enough of their assigned UUID to be unique on this server.