Data Structure
Networking
RDBMS
Operating System
Java
MS Excel
iOS
HTML
CSS
Android
Python
C Programming
C++
C#
MongoDB
MySQL
Javascript
PHP
Physics
Chemistry
Biology
Mathematics
English
Economics
Psychology
Social Studies
Fashion Studies
Legal Studies
- Selected Reading
- UPSC IAS Exams Notes
- Developer's Best Practices
- Questions and Answers
- Effective Resume Writing
- HR Interview Questions
- Computer Glossary
- Who is Who
Top tips to manage docker containers from command line
It’s true that the use of docker has skyrocketed in recent times and it will continue to increase in the coming years. Most organizations are now shifting their projects to docker containers if they have not already. Thus, only acquiring basic knowledge regarding creating and maintaining docker containers and images is not enough to keep up with the pace of such a huge technological shift.
Managing a large number of containers and images through a single command line interface (CLI) seems to be a tedious task, but with proper set of management skills and hands-on experience with docker CLI commands, this becomes a piece of cake.
Here, in this article, let’s discuss some of the tools, that will help you manage all your docker containers and images all at a single site very easily and will definitely save you loads of time.
Listing out images and containers
With a number of images and containers running in a single machine, it becomes important to keep track of their latest tags, sizes, IDs and other features frequently which would help you to manage them easily.
The following command helps you to do exactly the same.
sudo docker images
The above command lists all the images along with their latest tags, sizes, IDs and date of creation.
After creating the images, if you want to know the list of containers that currently exists in your system, you can use the following command.
sudo docker ps
The above command displays the list of all running container IDs, their corresponding images, creation dates, status etc.
If you want a list of all containers whether running or not, you can simply add an option to the above command.
sudo docker ps -a
Using aliases to save time
Some of the docker commands can be too tricky to remember because they can be very lengthy, You can create your own aliases and define them into your ~/.bashrc file.
Examples
alias dl=’docker ps -l -q’ alias drm=’docker rm’ alias dps=’docker ps’
Deleting containers and images
To remove a particular container, you have the rm option. The syntax for this command is
sudo docker rm YOUR_CONTAINER_ID
To find out the container ID of the container you want to delete, you can use the command which is also discussed above.
sudo docker ps -a
In case, a container is running, you need to stop the container before trying to remove it using the following command.
sudo docker stop YOUR_CONTAINER_ID
To remove a docker image, you first need to remove all the containers of that particular image. After that, you can remove the image using the following command.
sudo docker rmi YOUR_IMAGE_ID
You can get the image ID of a particular image using the following command which is also discussed above.
sudo docker images
Running a container in interactive shell
Suppose you have pulled an ubuntu image from docker hub, using the following command.
sudo docker pull ubuntu
Now, you want to run the ubuntu container in an interactive shell. You can use the following command to achieve this.
sudo docker run -it ubuntu
You can now access the ubuntu image using a separate interactive command shell.
Try removing all the dangling volumes
When you try to delete a container, it’s always likely that the volume associated with the container also gets deleted with it. Such a volume is called dangling volume. To find out a list of all dangling volumes, use the following command.
sudo docker volume ls -f dangling=true
After issuing the above command, you will find a list of all dangling volumes with their driver name and volume name if they exist.
To avoid dangling volumes, delete a container using the -v flag.
sudo docker rm -v YOUR_CONTAINER_ID
Some important commands
Here is a curated list of some of the most important commands that are related to images and docker containers that would come very handy if you handle large numbers of such objects.
Container commands
To list all the containers that are currently running in your system, use the command docker container ls
To stop a running container forcefully, use docker container kill container_id
To get a detailed information of a particular running container, use docker inspect container_id
Image commands
To get a list of all local images, use docker image ls
To remove all the dangling images, use docker image prune
To conclude, these were a list of top tips which would come very handy when you work with huge numbers of images and containers and would surely help you to efficiently manage them, saving loads of time.
194 Views
To Continue Learning Please Login