page_title: Container
page_description: Definitions of a container
page_keywords: containers, lxc, concepts, explanation, image, container

# Container

## Introduction

![](/terms/images/docker-filesystems-busyboxrw.png)

Once you start a process in Docker from an [*Image*](/terms/image), Docker
fetches the image and its [*Parent Image*](/terms/image), and repeats the
process until it reaches the [*Base Image*](/terms/image/#base-image-def). Then
the [*Union File System*](/terms/layer) adds a read-write layer on top. That
read-write layer, plus the information about its [*Parent
Image*](/terms/image)
and some additional information like its unique id, networking
configuration, and resource limits is called a **container**.

## Container State

Containers can change, and so they have state. A container may be
**running** or **exited**.

When a container is running, the idea of a "container" also includes a
tree of processes running on the CPU, isolated from the other processes
running on the host.

When the container is exited, the state of the file system and its exit
value is preserved. You can start, stop, and restart a container. The
processes restart from scratch (their memory state is **not** preserved
in a container), but the file system is just as it was when the
container was stopped.

You can promote a container to an [*Image*](/terms/image) with `docker commit`.
Once a container is an image, you can use it as a parent for new containers.

## Container IDs

All containers are identified by a 64 hexadecimal digit string
(internally a 256bit value). To simplify their use, a short ID of the
first 12 characters can be used on the command line. There is a small
possibility of short id collisions, so the docker server will always
return the long ID.