Why docker container exits immediately

Question

I run a container in the background using

 docker run -d --name hadoop h_Service

it exits quickly. But if I run in the foreground, it works

Answer 1

There are many possible ways to cause a docker to exit immediately. For me, it was the problem with my Dockerfile. There was a bug in that file. I had ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet", "M4Movie_Api.dll] instead of ENTRYPOINT ["dotnet", "M4Movie_Api.dll"]. As you can see I had missed one quotation(") at the end.

To analyze the problem I started my container and quickly attached my container so that I could see what was the exact problem.

C:\SVenu\M4Movie\Api\Api>docker start 4ea373efa21b


C:\SVenu\M4Movie\Api\Api>docker attach 4ea373efa21b

Where 4ea373efa21b is my container id. This drives me to the actual issue.

After finding the issue, I had to build, restore, publish my container again.

Answer 2

If you check Dockerfile from containers, for example fballiano/magento2-apache-php

you'll see that at the end of his file he adds the following command: while true; do sleep 1; done

Now, what I recommend, is that you do this

docker container ls --all | grep 127

Then, you will see if your docker image had an error, if it exits with 0, then it probably needs one of these commands that will sleep forever.

Answer 3

Since the image is a linux, one thing to check is to make sure any shell scripts used in the container have unix line endings. If they have a ^M at the end then they are windows line endings. One way to fix them is with dos2unix on /usr/local/start-all.sh to convert them from windows to unix. Running the docker in interactive mode can help figure out other problems. You could have a file name typo or something. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline

Answer 4

Add this to the end of Dockerfile:

CMD tail -f /dev/null

Sample Docker file:

FROM ubuntu:16.04

# other commands

CMD tail -f /dev/null

Reference

Answer 5

My pracitce is in the Dockerfile start a shell which will not exit immediately CMD [ "sh", "-c", "service ssh start; bash"], then run docker run -dit image_name. This way the (ssh) service and container is up running.

Answer 6

Why docker container exits immediately?

If you want to force the image to hang around (in order to debug something or examine state of the file system) you can override the entry point to change it to a shell:

docker run -it --entrypoint=/bin/bash myimagename