Welcome to my Docker Essentials series, which teaches you the basics you’ll need to know in order to get started with Docker. In this video, we look at the process of running containers on our host.

Commands used in this video

Search for available container images

 docker search

Run the Ubuntu container

 docker run ubuntu

Note: The container will just exit, since it needs some sort of task to run in order to stay running (as explained in the video).

Show running containers

 docker ps

Show all containers

 docker ps -a

Show locally downloaded images

 docker images

Run the Ubuntu container, and attach to a command prompt

 docker run -it ubuntu /bin/bash

Note: Since we gave it a task to perform (/bin/bash) it will stay running.

Install vim inside the container

After attaching to a bash shell within the container, run:

 apt update
 apt dist-upgrade

Docker containers are not stateful

The video shows the process of installing vim inside the container, and after exiting and relaunching the container, vim is no longer present and has to be installed again. Saving changes to containers will be discussed later on in the series.