Hello lovely people! 👋 During my day to day work with SONiC I have to launch new Docker containers and run commands within those containers. I usually have an ENTRYPOINT or CMD defined in my Dockerfile which means that there is always a default process that starts when I run my Docker images. When I started working with Docker I would always use the attach command to connect to a running container.

As an example, my Dockerfile usually looks something like this:

FROM ubuntu:18.04

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -qy vim

COPY startup.py /startup.py
ENTRYPOINT ["python", "startup.py"]

I then build an image based on this Dockerfile:

sudo docker build -t yasoob/imagename 

Then I usually start up a container based on this latest image:

sudo docker run --name container_name -it -d yasoob/imagename:latest

At this point, I have two ways to connect to the Docker container. I can either use attach or exec. It is important to know the difference.

• attach allows you to connect and interact with a container’s main process which has PID 1
• exec allows you to create a new process in the container

#docker #attach #exec #images #entrypoint #dockerfile