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Running and stopping containers

Next we will start using a more useful image than hello-world. We can run Ubuntu just with docker run ubuntu.

$ docker run ubuntu
  Unable to find image 'ubuntu:latest' locally
  latest: Pulling from library/ubuntu
  83ee3a23efb7: Pull complete
  db98fc6f11f0: Pull complete
  f611acd52c6c: Pull complete
  Digest: sha256:703218c0465075f4425e58fac086e09e1de5c340b12976ab9eb8ad26615c3715
  Status: Downloaded newer image for ubuntu:latest

Anticlimactic as nothing really happened. The image was downloaded and ran and that was the end of that. It actually tried to open a shell but we will need to add a few flags to interact with it. -t will create a tty.

$ docker run -t ubuntu
  root@f83969ce2cd1:/#

Now we're inside the container and if we input ls and press enter... nothing happens. Because our terminal is not sending the messages into the container. The -i flag will instruct to pass the STDIN to the container. If you're stuck with the other terminal you can just stop the container.

$ docker run -it ubuntu
  root@2eb70ecf5789:/# ls
  bin  boot  dev  etc  home  lib  lib32  lib64  libx32  media  mnt  opt  proc  root  run  sbin  srv  sys  tmp  usr  var

Great! Now we know at least 3 useful flags. -i (interactive), -t (tty) and -d (detached).

Let's throw in a few more and run a container in the background:

$ docker run -d -it --name looper ubuntu sh -c 'while true; do date; sleep 1; done'
Quotes

If you are command prompt (Windows) user you must use double quotes around the script i.e. docker run -d -it --name looper ubuntu sh -c "while true; do date; sleep 1; done". The quote or double-quote may haunt you later during the course.

  • The first part, docker run -d. Should be familiar by now, run container detached.

  • Followed by -it is short for -i and -t. Also familiar, -it allows you to interact with the container by using the command line.

  • Because we ran the container with --name looper, we can now reference it easily.

  • The image is ubuntu and what follows it is the command given to the container.

And to check that it's running, run docker container ls

Let's follow -f the output of logs with

$ docker logs -f looper
  Thu Mar  1 15:51:29 UTC 2023
  Thu Mar  1 15:51:30 UTC 2023
  Thu Mar  1 15:51:31 UTC 2023
  ...

Let's test pausing the looper without exiting or stopping it. In another terminal run docker pause looper. Notice how the logs output has paused in the first terminal. To unpause run docker unpause looper.

Keep the logs open and attach to the running container from the second terminal using 'attach':

$ docker attach looper
  Thu Mar  1 15:54:38 UTC 2023
  Thu Mar  1 15:54:39 UTC 2023
  ...

Now you have process logs (STDOUT) running in two terminals. Now press control+c in the attached window. The container is stopped because the process is no longer running.

If we want to attach to a container while making sure we don't close it from the other terminal we can specify to not attach STDIN with --no-stdin option. Let's start the stopped container with docker start looper and attach to it with --no-stdin.

Then try control+c.

$ docker start looper

$ docker attach --no-stdin looper
  Thu Mar  1 15:56:11 UTC 2023
  Thu Mar  1 15:56:12 UTC 2023
  ^C

The container will continue running. Control+c now only disconnects you from the STDOUT.

To enter a container, we can start a new process in it.

$ docker exec -it looper bash

  root@2a49df3ba735:/# ps aux

  USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
  root         1  0.2  0.0   2612  1512 pts/0    Ss+  12:36   0:00 sh -c while true; do date; sleep 1; done
  root        64  1.5  0.0   4112  3460 pts/1    Ss   12:36   0:00 bash
  root        79  0.0  0.0   2512   584 pts/0    S+   12:36   0:00 sleep 1
  root        80  0.0  0.0   5900  2844 pts/1    R+   12:36   0:00 ps aux

From the ps aux listing we can see that our bash process got PID (process ID) of 64.

Now that we're inside the container it behaves as you'd expect from Ubuntu, and we can exit the container with exit and then either kill or stop the container.

Our looper won't stop for a SIGTERM signal sent by a stop command. To terminate the process, stop follows the SIGTERM with a SIGKILL after a grace period. In this case, it's simply faster to use kill.

$ docker kill looper
$ docker rm looper

Running the previous two commands is basically equivalent to running docker rm --force looper

Let's start another process with -it and add --rm in order to remove it automatically after it has exited. The --rm ensures that there are no garbage containers left behind. It also means that docker start can not be used to start the container after it has exited.

$ docker run -d --rm -it --name looper-it ubuntu sh -c 'while true; do date; sleep 1; done'

Now let's attach to the container and hit control+p, control+q to detach us from the STDOUT.

$ docker attach looper-it

  Mon Jan 15 19:50:42 UTC 2018
  Mon Jan 15 19:50:43 UTC 2018
  ^P^Qread escape sequence

Instead, if we had used ctrl+c, it would have sent a kill signal followed by removing the container as we specified --rm in docker run command.

Exercise 1.3​

Exercise 1.3: Secret message

Now that we've warmed up it's time to get inside a container while it's running!

Image devopsdockeruh/simple-web-service:ubuntu will start a container that outputs logs into a file. Go inside the container and use tail -f ./text.log to follow the logs. Every 10 seconds the clock will send you a "secret message".

Submit the secret message and command(s) given as your answer.

Ubuntu in a container is just... Ubuntu​

A container that is running a Ubuntu image works quite like a normal Ubuntu:

$ docker run -it ubuntu
root@881a1d4ecff2:/# ls
bin   dev  home  media  opt   root  sbin  sys  usr
boot  etc  lib   mnt    proc  run   srv   tmp  var
root@881a1d4ecff2:/# ps
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
    1 pts/0    00:00:00 bash
   13 pts/0    00:00:00 ps
root@881a1d4ecff2:/# date
Wed Mar  1 12:08:24 UTC 2023
root@881a1d4ecff2:/#

An image like Ubuntu contains already a nice set of tools but sometimes just the one that we need is not within the standard distribution. Let us assume that we would like to edit some files inside the container. The good old Nano editor is a perfect fit for our purposes. We can install it in the container by using apt-get:

$ docker run -it ubuntu
root@881a1d4ecff2:/# apt-get update
root@881a1d4ecff2:/# apt-get -y install nano
root@881a1d4ecff2:/# cd tmp/
root@881a1d4ecff2:/tmp# nano temp_file.txt

As can be seen, installing a program or library to a container happens just like the installation is done in "normal" Ubuntu. The remarkable difference is that the installation of Nano is not permanent, that is, if we remove our container, all is gone. We shall soon see how to get a more permanent solution for building images that are perfect to our purposes.

Exercise 1.4​

Exercise 1.4: Missing dependencies

Start a Ubuntu image with the process sh -c 'while true; do echo "Input website:"; read website; echo "Searching.."; sleep 1; curl http://$website; done'

If you're on Windows, you'll want to switch the ' and " around: sh -c "while true; do echo 'Input website:'; read website; echo 'Searching..'; sleep 1; curl http://$website; done".

You will notice that a few things required for proper execution are missing. Be sure to remind yourself which flags to use so that the container actually waits for input.

Note also that curl is NOT installed in the container yet. You will have to install it from inside of the container.

Test inputting helsinki.fi into the application. It should respond with something like

<html>
  <head>
    <title>301 Moved Permanently</title>
  </head>

  <body>
    <h1>Moved Permanently</h1>
    <p>The document has moved <a href="http://www.helsinki.fi/">here</a>.</p>
  </body>
</html>

This time return the command you used to start process and the command(s) you used to fix the ensuing problems.

Hint for installing the missing dependencies you could start a new process with docker exec.

  • This exercise has multiple solutions, if the curl for helsinki.fi works then it's done. Can you figure out other (smart) solutions?