Docker Cheat Sheet

Following are a number of my commonly used docker commands for my own reference

Building

Run the following in the same directory in which your Dockerfile resides

docker build -t <image-name>:<version> .

Or you can specify the path to the Dockerfile

docker build . -t <image-name>:<version> -f /path/to/Dockerfile

Running

Run a container interactively

Especially useful when debugging commands that you will encapsulate in a Docker file, this will enable you to run a base image and then execute commands interactively without having to continuously run docker build . to test things out. Note the -u root to start the interactive session as the root user. If you just want to get on the container and look around you can omit this argument.

docker run -it -u root <image:tag> <shell-in-image>

Copy files to and from a running container

Assuming that you already have the container running, first run docker ps to get the id of the container

# Copy file from local file system into the container
docker cp <file-path> <container-id>:<target-path-in-container>

# Copy file from container to local file system
docker cp <container-id>:<target-path-in-container> <file-path-on-local-filesystem>

Purging images and volumes

Remove all unused or dangling images, containers, and networks. The -a will remove any stopped containers and unused images

docker system prune [-a]

To remove dangling volumes you must run a docker volume rm <volume-name> for each volume you want to remove. Running docker volume prune does not remove unused volumes.