Docker - Container is not running

Question

I'm completely a newbie to docker. I tried to start a exited container like follows,

1. I listed down all available containers using docker ps -a. It listed the following:

   

2. I entered the following commands to start the container which is in the exited stage and enter into the terminal of that image.

   docker start 79b3fa70b51d
   docker exec -it 79b3fa70b51d /bin/sh
   

3. It is throwing the following error.

   FATA[0000] Error response from daemon: Container 79b3fa70b51d is not running

But when I start the container using docker start 79b3fa70b51d. It throws the container ID as output which is normal if it have everything work normally. I'm not sure what causes this error. Any idea about the causes and suggestions about this would be greatly helpful for me. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

By default, docker container will exit immediately if you do not have any task running on the container.

To keep the container running in the background, try to run it with --detach (or -d) argument.

For examples:

docker pull debian

docker run -t -d --name my_debian debian
e7672d54b0c2

docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND             CREATED             STATUS              PORTS               NAMES
e7672d54b0c2        debian              "bash"              3 minutes ago       Up 3 minutes                            my_debian

#now you can execute command on the container
docker exec -it my_debian bash
root@e7672d54b0c2:/#