Docker: Up & Running

Chapter 8. Debugging Containers

Once you’ve shipped an application to production, there will come a day when it’s not working as expected. It’s always nice to know ahead of time what to expect when that day comes. Debugging a containerized application is not all that different from debugging a normal process on a system.

First, we’ll cover one of the easiest ways to see what’s going on inside your containers. By using the docker top command, you can see the process list as your container understands it. It is also critical to understand that your application is not running in a separate system from the other Docker processes. They share a kernel, likely a filesystem, and depending on your container configuration, they may share network interfaces. That means you can get a lot of information about what your container is doing.

If you’re used to debugging applications in a virtual machine environment, you might think you would need to enter the container to inspect in detail an application’s memory or CPU use, or debug system calls. Not so! Despite feeling in many ways like a virtualization layer, processes in containers are just processes on the Docker host itself. If you want to see a process list across all of the Docker containers on a machine, you can just run ps with your favorite command-line options right on the server, for example. Let’s look at some things you can do when debugging a containerized application.

Process Output

Docker has a built-in command for showing what’s ...