Managing Docker containers

Now that Docker is installed and running, let’s take it for a test drive. After installing Docker, we have the docker command available to use now, which has various sub-commands to perform different functions with containers. First, let’s try out docker search:

docker search ubuntu

With Docker, containers are created from images. There are many pre-existing container images we can use, or we can build our own. The docker search command allows us to search for a container image that already exists and has been made available to us. Once we’ve chosen an image, we can download it locally and create container instances from it.

The ability of administrators to search for (and download) an existing container is just one of many great features Docker offers us. Although we can definitely build our own container images (and we will do so, right here in this chapter), sometimes it might make sense to use a pre-existing container...