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page_title: Dockerizing Applications: A "Hello World!" page_description: A simple "Hello World!" exercise that introduced you to Docker. page_keywords: docker guide, docker, docker platform, virtualization framework, how to, dockerize, dockerizing apps, dockerizing applications, container, containers
Dockerizing Applications: A "Hello World!"
So what's this Docker thing all about?
Docker allows you to run applications inside containers. Running an
application inside a container takes a single command: docker run
.
Hello World!
Let's try it now.
$ sudo docker run ubuntu:14.04 /bin/echo 'Hello World'
Hello World!
And you just launched your first container!
So what just happened? Let's step through what the docker run
command
did.
First we specified the docker
binary and the command we wanted to
execute, run
. The docker run
combination runs containers.
Next we specified an image: ubuntu:14.04
. This is the source of the container
we ran. Docker calls this an image. In this case we used an Ubuntu 14.04
operating system image.
When you specify an image, Docker looks first for the image on your Docker host. If it can't find it then it downloads the image from the public image registry: Docker Hub.
Next we told Docker what command to run inside our new container:
/bin/echo 'Hello World!'
When our container was launched Docker created a new Ubuntu 14.04
environment and then executed the /bin/echo
command inside it. We saw
the result on the command line:
Hello World!
So what happened to our container after that? Well Docker containers
only run as long as the command you specify is active. Here, as soon as
Hello World!
was echoed, the container stopped.
An Interactive Container
Let's try the docker run
command again, this time specifying a new
command to run in our container.
$ sudo docker run -t -i ubuntu:14.04 /bin/bash
root@af8bae53bdd3:/#
Here we've again specified the docker run
command and launched an
ubuntu:14.04
image. But we've also passed in two flags: -t
and -i
.
The -t
flag assigns a pseudo-tty or terminal inside our new container
and the -i
flag allows us to make an interactive connection by
grabbing the standard in (STDIN
) of the container.
We've also specified a new command for our container to run:
/bin/bash
. This will launch a Bash shell inside our container.
So now when our container is launched we can see that we've got a command prompt inside it:
root@af8bae53bdd3:/#
Let's try running some commands inside our container:
root@af8bae53bdd3:/# pwd
/
root@af8bae53bdd3:/# ls
bin boot dev etc home lib lib64 media mnt opt proc root run sbin srv sys tmp usr var
You can see we've run the pwd
to show our current directory and can
see we're in the /
root directory. We've also done a directory listing
of the root directory which shows us what looks like a typical Linux
file system.
You can play around inside this container and when you're done you can
use the exit
command to finish.
root@af8bae53bdd3:/# exit
As with our previous container, once the Bash shell process has finished, the container is stopped.
A Daemonized Hello World!
Now a container that runs a command and then exits has some uses but it's not overly helpful. Let's create a container that runs as a daemon, like most of the applications we're probably going to run with Docker.
Again we can do this with the docker run
command:
$ sudo docker run -d ubuntu:14.04 /bin/sh -c "while true; do echo hello world; sleep 1; done"
1e5535038e285177d5214659a068137486f96ee5c2e85a4ac52dc83f2ebe4147
Wait what? Where's our "Hello World!" Let's look at what we've run here.
It should look pretty familiar. We ran docker run
but this time we
specified a flag: -d
. The -d
flag tells Docker to run the container
and put it in the background, to daemonize it.
We also specified the same image: ubuntu:14.04
.
Finally, we specified a command to run:
/bin/sh -c "while true; do echo hello world; sleep 1; done"
This is the (hello) world's silliest daemon: a shell script that echoes
hello world
forever.
So why aren't we seeing any hello world
's? Instead Docker has returned
a really long string:
1e5535038e285177d5214659a068137486f96ee5c2e85a4ac52dc83f2ebe4147
This really long string is called a container ID. It uniquely identifies a container so we can work with it.
Note: The container ID is a bit long and unwieldy and a bit later on we'll see a shorter ID and some ways to name our containers to make working with them easier.
We can use this container ID to see what's happening with our hello world
daemon.
Firstly let's make sure our container is running. We can
do that with the docker ps
command. The docker ps
command queries
the Docker daemon for information about all the containers it knows
about.
$ sudo docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
1e5535038e28 ubuntu:14.04 /bin/sh -c 'while tr 2 minutes ago Up 1 minute insane_babbage
Here we can see our daemonized container. The docker ps
has returned some useful
information about it, starting with a shorter variant of its container ID:
1e5535038e28
.
We can also see the image we used to build it, ubuntu:14.04
, the command it
is running, its status and an automatically assigned name,
insane_babbage
.
Note: Docker automatically names any containers you start, a little later on we'll see how you can specify your own names.
Okay, so we now know it's running. But is it doing what we asked it to do? To see this
we're going to look inside the container using the docker logs
command. Let's use the container name Docker assigned.
$ sudo docker logs insane_babbage
hello world
hello world
hello world
. . .
The docker logs
command looks inside the container and returns its standard
output: in this case the output of our command hello world
.
Awesome! Our daemon is working and we've just created our first Dockerized application!
Now we've established we can create our own containers let's tidy up
after ourselves and stop our daemonized container. To do this we use the
docker stop
command.
$ sudo docker stop insane_babbage
insane_babbage
The docker stop
command tells Docker to politely stop the running
container. If it succeeds it will return the name of the container it
has just stopped.
Let's check it worked with the docker ps
command.
$ sudo docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
Excellent. Our container has been stopped.
Next steps
Now we've seen how simple it is to get started with Docker let's learn how to do some more advanced tasks.
Go to Working With Containers.