Lifecycle of Docker Container

Nitin AGARWAL
2 min readJan 5, 2017

--

Though the above pic is self explanatory, we’ll just discuss the basics / CLI commands for working with docker containers.

Create container

Create a container to run it later on with required image.

docker create --name <container-name> <image-name>

Run docker container

Run the docker container with the required image and specified command / process. ‘-d’ flag is used for running the container in background.

docker run -it -d --name <container-name> <image-name> bash
Image Source and Credits: http://www.slideshare.net/w_akram/docker-introduction-59904719

Pause container

Used to pause the processes running inside the container.

docker pause <container-id/name>

Unpause container

Used to unpause the processes inside the container.

docker unpause <container-id/name>

Start container

Start the container, if present in stopped state.

docker start <container-id/name>

Stop container

To stop the container and processes running inside the container:

docker stop <container-id/name>

To stop all the running docker containers

docker stop $(docker ps -a -q)

Restart container

It is used to restart the container as well as processes running inside the container.

docker restart <container-id/name>

Kill container

We can kill the running container.

docker kill <container-id/name>

Destroy container

Its preferred to destroy container, only if present in stopped state instead of forcefully destroying the running container.

docker rm <container-id/name>

To remove all the stopped docker containers

docker rm $(docker ps -q -f status=exited)

Source: ~ Docker CLI

Disclaimer: Content and image source has been mentioned. Special credits to concerned folks.

--

--

Nitin AGARWAL

Senior Software Engineer — Cloud Native and Distributed Systems