Monday, May 9, 2016

Using docker for the first time ...

In my previous post I described how to install docker, in this post we are going to download a pre-built image and run it.

To check if the docker installation is working you can run
docker info

Downloading the Ubuntu Image
We start by downloading an Ubuntu Image to play with. Ubuntu posts its image to the docker repository of images called the docker hub. To pull the image from the hub you do
docker pull ubuntu

You will see that the image is getting downloaded to your local image cache and the hashes are shown and the message "pull complete".  The hash is called the image ID and are the first 12 characters of the full name of the image. If you reissue the pull, you will get the information that the the image already exists.

The Image Cache
To get an overview of your image cache you do
docker images

This will show you the name of the images, their ID, size and when they got created. To get more information about the image you can do docker inspect followed by the IMAGE ID.

Starting the Container
To start your first container you do docker run -i -t ubuntu /bin/bash. This will open a prompt in your container. The -i flag tells docker it is an interactive container. The -t creates a pseudo-TTY and attaches it to stdin and stdout.

To exit the container you need to enter the sequence ctrl+p followed by ctrl+q. To have an overview of what is running you have docker ps -a.

To reattach the image back to the TTY you do docker attach followed by the IMAGE ID.

Quitting the Container
When you are done with the container you simply type exit and it closes your session. If you run a docker ps -a after you have exited your container you will see it described as "exited x minutes ago".

Installing Software
We will come back on how to prepare the container but I just already want to point out that if you start a container, install software and then exit the container the installed software is no longer in the container since every time you run docker run -i -t ubuntu /bin/bash a new container is started.

The same logic also applies to data, so if you want to use a container for running something and need a configuration, you got to make sure the configuration is stored outside of your container.

What Happens When You Run a Container?
When you type docker run it tells the daemon you want it to run a container. The parameters we specified are the image it needs to run and what to start if the image is running. In our case above we specified the Ubuntu image and to run /bin/bash.

  1. If the image is not available on the system it will be pulled from the Docker Hub 
  2. Once the image exists on the system docker will create a container.
  3. The container is created with a read-write layer on top.
  4. The network interface is set up to communicate with the localhost.
  5. The IP address is set up.
  6. The requested process is executed.
 

No comments: