I want to update the resources of one container on the fly using
docker update --cpus 4 --memory 256M mycontainer
Does it restart the container or affect the execution in other ways?
According to the docs:
The docker update command dynamically updates container configuration.
Which means that you can freely update any configuration you like. But:
With the exception of the --kernel-memory option, you can specify these options on a running or a stopped container. On kernel version older than 4.6, you can only update --kernel-memory on a stopped container or on a running container with kernel memory initialized.
So, till you are not using --kernel-memory option, you can use docker update without been restarted or stopped (according to the docs).
Answering your concrete question, turns out it will not restart your container.
Related
I succeeded in connecting to a remote server configured with Docker through vscode. By the way, the list of containers from the past was fetched from the remote explorer of vscode. If you look at this list of containers, they are obviously containers made with images I downloaded a few days ago. I don't know why this is happening.
Presumably, it is a problem with the settings.json file or a problem with some log.
I pressed f1 in vscode and select Remote-Containers: Attach to Running Container...
Then the docker command was entered automatically in the terminal. Here, a container (b25ee2cb9162) that I do not know where it came from has appeared.
After running this container, a new window opens with the message Starting Dev Container.
This is the list of containers that I said downloaded a few days ago. This is what vscode showed me.
What's the reason that this happened?
Those containers you are seeing are similar to those if you run docker container ls. The containers you are seeing have exited and are not automatically cleaned up by Docker unless specified in CLI --rm option.
The docs for the --rm option explain the reason for this nicely:
By default a container’s file system persists even after the container exits. This makes debugging a lot easier (since you can inspect the final state) and you retain all your data by default. But if you are running short-term foreground processes, these container file systems can really pile up. If instead you’d like Docker to automatically clean up the container and remove the file system when the container exits, you can add the --rm flag:
From this answer about these non-running containers taking up system resources you don't have to be concerned about these taking up much space expect minimal disk space.
To remove those containers, you have a few options:
[Preemptive] Use --rm flag when running container
You can pass the --rm flag when you run a container with the Docker to remove the containers after they have exited so old containers don't accumulate.
As the docs mention, the downside is after the container exits, it's difficult to debug why the container exited if something failed inside the container.
See the docs here if using docker run: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/run/#clean-up---rm
See this answer if using docker-compose run
Clean up existing containers from the command line
Use the docker container prune command to remove all stopped containers.
See the docs here: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/container_prune/
See this related SO answer if you're looking for other options:
Clean up containers from VSCode
VSCode Docker Containers Extension you clean up containers if you open the command palate and enter Docker Containers: Remove
Or you can simply right click those containers.
I have a process in an Ubuntu docker container. If it crashes, I want to restart it automatically.
What is the best way to go about it?
I checked systemd (which is the normal Linux method) but docker doesn't support it. inittab is also deprecated.
Docker offers such functionality, all you have to do is to define a restart policy for the container.
You should choose one of the available policies no,always,on-failure,unless-stopped and adjust your docker run command accordingly.
From docs:
To configure the restart policy for a container, use the --restart
flag when using the docker run command
For your case, choose one of always or on-failure.
Note: The above is valid only if the process you have mentioned is the container's entrypoint.
I am new to Docker, and I find the definitions of containers' lifecycle differ a lot.
here is what "Manning.Docker.in.Action.2016.3" shows：
here is what google gives me:
https://medium.com/#nagarwal/lifecycle-of-docker-container-d2da9f85959
here is what the official document says：
status： One of created, restarting, running, removing, paused, exited, or dead
https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/ps/
So what's going on here? I guess some new states(and renaming) are introduced in newer version of Docker?
Thanks in advance
Your linked diagram separates docker create from docker start, it includes "die" as a state transition, and it shows how to get to the "restarting" state. That's all valid, though it leads to a more complicated state machine.
(docker create wasn't in the very first versions of Docker but it appeared in Docker 1.3.0 in 2014, which should predate your diagram.)
Practically I might suggest an even simpler state machine:
-------> running -+------> stopped ------>
run | stop rm
\------> exited ------>
process exits rm
That is, never try to restart a container or make changes inside a running container; if you need to tweak anything, delete the existing container and create a new one. This gives you a consistent environment (when the main container process starts you always know what's in its filesystem, up to mounted data). It also matches what happens in cluster environments like Kubernetes, where the cluster manager will routinely create and delete containers for you.
When you get in a situation where internet gives you different answers, you should consider trying it yourself. Especially with technologies like docker, where it is pretty simple to make tests. For example:
I want to run a container (I will use nginx):
docker run -d nginx
docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
258cd2edbed8 nginx "nginx -g 'daemon of…" 3 seconds ago Up 2 seconds 80/tcp jolly_golick
Note: docker will keep a container running only if there is a process running in it.
If you would start a debian container (for example), you would see how it immediately stop, as there is nothing running in it. So you could do
docker run -d debian sleep 10
and see that the container is up for 10 seconds.
When a container is running, you can do some things on it. You can't do other things, like removing it. To remove a container, you need to stop it first (or kill it), or force container removal.
Note: You would get all this info from docker itself, if you would be playing around with it, as it would return these info. Like if you would try to remove a running container, you would get this error:
Error response from daemon: You cannot remove a running container 258cd2edbed85bed23ab543312968bd893c1fbd9ba81de40366337f434daedff. Stop the container before attempting removal or force remove
I can't do all possible combinations here. You would get a similar error if you would try removing a paused container. Just play with it, and you will get a clear picture of how it works.
We found that running docker rm myprocess takes quite a bit of time, much longer than docker run takes to start a fresh copy.
Is there a way we can make a container give up its name, so that we can first free up the name to be able to docker run again, and then do the time-consuming cleanup of the old container later?
That would make the stop/start cycle when updating to newer versions of the underlying image faster.
You can rename a container that already exists, or you could deploy with a new name then rename it afterwards:
docker rename myprocess myprocess-old
There have been multiple reports of that problem.
Issue 16281 mentions (about the devicemapper or dm):
Switching the dm.basesize to 10GB seems to be fixing the issue so far, maybe it would be worth reverting the default to 10GB instead of 100GB or even specify this option at the creation of the container as requested in issue 14678
See the docker daemon storage driver options:
docker daemon --storage-opt dm.basesize=10G
Switching to thinpool can help too:
docker daemon --storage-opt dm.thinpooldev=/dev/mapper/thin-pool
I run a specific docker image for the first time:
docker run [OPTIONS] image [CMD]
Some of the options I supply include --link (link with other containers) and -p (expose ports)
I noticed that if I kill that container and simply do docker start <container-id>, Docker honors all the options that I specified during the run command including the links and ports.
Is this behavior explicitly documented and can I always count on the start command to reincarnate the container with all the options I supplied in the run command?
Also, I noticed that killing/starting a container which is linked to another container updates the upstream container's /etc/hosts file automatically:
A--(link)-->B (A has an entry in /etc/hosts for B)
If I kill B, B will normally get a new IP address. I notice that when i start B, the entry for B in A's /etc/hosts file is automatically updated... This is very nice.
I read here that --link does not handle container restarts... Has this been updated recently? If not, why am I seeing this behavior?
(Im using Docker version 1.7.1, build 786b29d)
Yes, things work as you describe :)
You can rely on the behaviour of docker start as it doesn't really "reincarnate" your container; it was always there on disk, just in a stopped state. It will also retain any changes to files, but changes in RAM, such as process state, will be lost. (Note that kill doesn't remove a container, it just stops it with a SIGKILL rather than a SIGTERM, use docker rm to truly remove a container).
Links are now updated when a container changes IP address due to a restart. This didn't use to be the case. However, that's not what the linked question is about - they are discussing whether you can replace a container with a new container of the same name and have links still work. This isn't possible, but that scenario will be covered by the new networking functionality and "service" objects which is currently in the Docker experimental channel.