Remember that we’re not dealing with Windows PowerShell or even native Windows shell commands. First, I want to speak to you briefly about Docker documentation. We’ll work with our newly generated container in a moment. The - it switch denotes an interactive (virtual console) session, by the way. Now, we’ll create a new container named ‘core1’ and start a PowerShell-based interactive session: docker run -it -name core1 windowsservercore powershell.exe First, I’ll show you the generic syntax: docker run IMAGE Here, of course, we’ll start a Windows Server 2016 Core container, and I’ll send the command powershell.exe so we’re in a PowerShell console on container start. Here’s where containerization begins to shine-you can start Web servers, database servers, and app servers with a single statement and within seconds. We use docker run to run a command in a new container.
docker ps –a (lists all containers, both started and stopped).docker ps (lists all running containers).We use the following Docker commands to list containers: The difference is that we can reference the image either by the TAG identifier 6.0 or by the more user-friendly TAG ID ‘latest.’Ī container is an instance of a given image. You can verify this by inspecting the IMAGE ID property, which is a unique identifier for a given image. A writer’s gotta do what a writer’s gotta do, you know? ?Īlthough it looks like the VM has two pre-built Docker images, there’s really only one. I renamed the VIRTUAL SIZE property to VSIZE simply to get the output to line up properly for this article. Windowsservercore latest 6801d964fda5 12 weeks ago 0 B Windowsservercore 6.0 6801d964fda5 12 weeks ago 0 B The Windows Server 2016 TP4 instance contains one prebuilt OS container mage that runs Windows Server 2016 Core itself we use the command docker images to list Docker images: PS C:\> docker images
In other words, the image represents a blueprint for a containerized operating system, service, or application. Recall that in Docker terminology, an image is analogous to a class in object-oriented programming.
This isn’t a hacky, Cygwin-dependent port-this is a code rewrite that gives us full Docker container functionality (including its robust command set), all from within Windows! I have to stress to you how awesome an accomplishment it is on Microsoft’s and Docker’s parts that we have a native Docker runtime environment running in Windows Server 2016. Viewing images and creating a container ^ Once you’re logged into your Windows Server 2016 Core RDP session, let’s verify that the Docker daemon’s running: PS C:\> Get-Service -Name DockerĪnd as a quick sanity check, let’s retrieve the currently installed Docker version from within the PowerShell console: PS C:\> docker -versionĬoolio! We’re ready to proceed. We do need RDP in this case because the Windows Server containers we create will run in separate windows (technically cmd.exe or powershell.exe sessions), and that doesn’t work in the ISE, to the best of my knowledge. Can’t you open a remote tab in the Windows PowerShell ISE?” You may be thinking, “Tim, why do you want to RDP into an Azure VM that’s running Server Core? All you have is a command prompt anyway. In case you’re interested, I use the official Microsoft Remote Desktop app on my Macs and rdesktop on my Linux computers. I say that Azure is a “portable” solution because I can RDP into my cloud VM from Windows, OS X, or Linux. Azure makes it convenient to deploy container-aware Windows Server instances.