Docker Useful Hacks: Cheat Sheet For Beginners to Experts

Docker has many commands to remember. If you are starting up with docker, We are pretty sure that you will have a hard time remembering all those commands and to manage containers. In this article, we have explained the necessary command to make you more productive while working with docker.

Docker Useful Hacks

The following section contains useful hacks that help you while working with docker. We don’t recommend using the bulk stopping and removing commands in production. This is just for dev purposes.

Run docker without sudo

When you install docker, you have to use sudo to work with docker commands. To avoid using sudo, you need to add your current user to docker group using the following command. Restart the terminal for the changes to take place

usermod -aG docker ${USER}

Execute the following command if you do not want to restart the terminal

newgrp docker

Connecting to Docker Container

Use “docker exec” command to connect to a running container. This command will attach a shell session in your current terminal.

docker exec -it  <container-name>  bash
docker exec -it  <container-name>  sh

Remove Unused Docker Objects

The best way to remove all stopped, dangling and unused networks is through prune command.

docker system prune

You can remove all unused docker volumes using volume prune command.

docker system prune --volumes

Stopping all containers at once

docker stop $(docker ps -a -q)

To forcefully stop,

docker stop -f $(docker ps -a -q)

Removing all containers at once

docker rm $(docker ps -a -q)

To forcefully remove,

docker rm -f $(docker ps -a -q)

Removing all docker images at once

docker rmi $(docker images -q)

To forcefully remove,

docker rmi -f $(docker images -q)

Assign a name to the container

To assign a name to a container, use the “–name” parameter as shown below.

docker run -d --name <name-of-container> ubuntu/apache

List all running containers

To list all the running containers, you can use the docker ps command

docker ps

List all containers

To list all running, stopped and exited containers, you can use the -a flag.

docker ps -a

List all images

To list all the available docker images in your host, use the following command.

docker images

Remove unwanted/intermediate/untagged images

Most of the times while building new images, there is a possibility of untagged, intermediate images that might eat up your disk space as well as increases your images list. To clean up those images, you can use the following command.

docker rmi $(docker images --filter "dangling=true" -q --no-trunc)