Docker: Up & Running, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Exploring Docker

Now that you have some experience working with containers and images, we can explore some of Docker’s other capabilities. In this chapter, we’ll continue to use the docker command-line tool to talk to the running dockerd server that you’ve configured, while visiting some of the other fundamental commands.

Docker provides commands to do a number of additional things easily:

• Printing the Docker version

• Viewing the server information

• Downloading image updates

• Inspecting containers

• Entering a running container

• Returning a result

• Viewing logs

• Monitoring statistics

• And much more…

Let’s take a look at these and some of the additional community tooling that augments Docker’s native capabilities.

Printing the Docker Version

If you completed the last chapter, you have a working Docker daemon on a Linux server or virtual machine, and you’ve started a base container to make sure it’s all working. If you haven’t set that up already and you want to try out the steps in the rest of the book, you’ll want to follow the installation steps in Chapter 3 before you move on with this section.

The absolute simplest thing you can do with Docker is print the versions of the various components. It might not sound like much, but this is a useful tool to have because the server and API are often not backward compatible with older clients. Knowing how to show the version will help you troubleshoot certain types of connection issues. Sometimes, for example, ...