#DockerDays Day 2- Running your first Container

In the previous part of this series, we familiarized ourselves with different concepts involving Docker. In this part of the series, we will look into some of the basic commands and run our first container.

The first step of course would be to install Docker on your PC. We will be using a Windows Host in this example and hence, would use the Docker Desktop For Windows. You can follow the instructions in the following link to install Docker Desktop For Windows.

Docker Desktop For Windows

Running your first Container

Time to get up and running. Let us run our first container. The Docker community maintains a “hello-world” image, running a minimal hello world app, which is a good place to start our journey.

docker pull

The first step is to download the image. You can use the pull command, which downloads an image from the Docker Hub.

> docker pull hello-world

The above command would be to download the image for “hello-world” from the Docker Hub Registry. By default, if no tag is specified, :latest tag would be used. This can be observed in the log when you execute the above command.

> docker pull hello-world
Using default tag: latest
latest: Pulling from library/hello-world
2db29710123e: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:97a379f4f88575512824f3b352bc03cd75e239179eea0fecc38e597b2209f49a
Status: Downloaded newer image for hello-world:latest
docker.io/library/hello-world:latest

Docker Tags are named references for Docker images. They make it easier for developers to reference a particular variant of the image. Note that I used the word variant and not version. This was intensional. The tags don’t refer to a particular version of the image. An image with the same tag can be updated with a newer version which might have a different feature set. Also, multiple tags can be pointed to the same image.

To download a particular variant of the image, you can use the pull along with the tag name.

docker pull hello-world:linux

To download all the variants(tags) of the image, you can use the -a flag along with the pull command. For example,

> docker pull -a hello-world

Similarly, by default, the images are pulled from the Docker Hub Register. But you could pull images from your own register by specifying the register url.

> docker pull imageName registryUrl

docker images

> docker images
REPOSITORY    TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED        SIZE
hello-world   latest    feb5d9fea6a5   4 months ago   13.3kB
hello-world   linux     feb5d9fea6a5   4 months ago   13.3kB

docker run

Now that we have downloaded our images, it is time to run it. For running the container, you can use the docker run command.

> docker run hello-world:latest

The docker run commands create a writable layer over the image and start the container. The above command would run the “hello-world” with tag “latest”. If you observe the Container List in the Docker Desktop, you will notice that the Container runs under a random name.

This is because we haven’t supplied a name for the container. You can specify the name using the --name flag followed by the container name of your choice. For example

> docker run --name helloWorldContainer hello-world:latest

The above command would run the hello-world image as a container with the name helloWorldContainer. If you want to run the container as a background server, you can use the -d flag along with the docker run command.

If you specify an image that doesn’t exist in the host machine, docker would also execute the docker pull command to download it from the docker hub, before executing the docker run.

docker ps

If you would like to see the already running (or ran) containers, you can use the docker ps command.

> docker ps

The docker ps commands list all the containers that are currently running. In this above case, the helloWorldContainer would have already exited. To see all the containers that are in the system (running and stopped), you can use the --all or -a flag.

> docker ps -a

Sample output

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                COMMAND    CREATED          STATUS                      PORTS     NAMES
095a0963c2f7   hello-world:latest   "/hello"   8 minutes ago    Exited (0) 8 minutes ago              helloWorldContainer
57f6d3987440   hello-world:latest   "/hello"   17 minutes ago   Exited (0) 17 minutes ago             brave_mcclintock

docker start

You can start a stopped container using the docker start [containerName] command.

docker start helloWorldContainer

Running Sql Server as Container

We have, so far, familiarized ourselves with common commands. Let us now use our newly acquired knowledge to run a Microsoft Sql Server container. We will use the mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server image with 2019-latest tag for our exercise.

docker run --name nt-user-sqlserver -e "ACCEPT_EULA=Y" -e "SA_PASSWORD=YourPassword" -p 1433:1433 -d mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2019-latest

We have already known some of the flags, but there are some new ones introduced here. Let us look at the one by one

It is important to expose the port to the host (using the -p). Otherwise, your Sql Client will not able to connect to the container. Now you can use your favorite Sql Client tool to connect to the database.

Summary

In this part of the tutorial, we learned how to download, and run your favorite container from Docker Hub. We also familiarized ourselves with some of the important flags that can be used with these commands. We also learned how to expose a container port to the host such that the host machine could interact with the container.

So far we have worked on a single container. But in a multi-container environment, how do the different containers interact with each other? We will into the details in the next blog.