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 take a look at how to access the application that’s running inside a container by forwarding ports.

Launch an NGINX container

 docker run nginx

Note: The container is fairly useless by default, you can’t easily access the app running inside unless you forward the port to a port on the host.

Launch an NGINX container, with port-mapping

This variation of the previous command will also launch an NGINX container, but also map a port inside the container to a port on the host:

 docker run -it -d -p 8080:80 nginx

Stop a container

To stop a container, run the following command against its ID:

 docker stop <id>

Launch an NGINX container, with port-mapping and auto-restart

The following command is similar to the previous one, but if the container exits for some reason, it will be relaunched:

 docker run -d -it --restart unless-stopped -p 8080:80 lltv/apache-test-1:1.0