Here I collect Docker commands that I found very useful but hard to remember. I don’t go into details here. It’s just a collection for lookup purposes. But there are also more concrete examples on this site.
Managing Containers
List all containers, including stopped ones:
docker ps -a
Attach Shell
Start and attach bash in a new container with mounting and port forwarding:
docker run -v $PWD/data:/home/data -p 8080:8080 -it ubuntu:latest /bin/bash
Start and attach to an existing container:
docker start -a -i $DOCKER_ID
Attach bash on a running container:
docker exec -it $DOCKER_ID /bin/bash
Alpine containers have ash instead of bash installed:
docker exec -it $DOCKER_ID /bin/ash
Images
Save image to a file:
docker save -o image_file.tar image/name
Load image from a file:
docker load -i image_file.tar
Files
Copy file from docker container to host system (and vice versa):
docker cp $DOCKER_ID:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf /path/on/host/default.conf
Logs
Show logs of a docker container:
docker logs $DOCKER_ID
# follow log live on stdout:
docker logs --follow $DOCKER_ID
# show only last 10 entries:
docker logs --tail 10 $DOCKER_ID
There are more interesting flags like --since, --until, --timestamps,… See docker logs --help for details.