How to detect if docker run succeeded programmatically?

Bash Problem Overview

I'm writing a very simple bash script to quickly check that my container still builds and starts correctly and that the app inside responds to requests.

Sometimes docker run fails, e.g. because the port I'm trying to bind the container to is already allocated. But when this happens docker run's exit code is still 0 so I can't use the exit code. How can I check programmatically that the container got started correctly?

The solutions I'm considering are:

parse the output for errors
docker ps to see if the container is running

but these both seem a little overkill and ugly. Am I missing a better way to check whether docker run succeeded?

Bash Solutions

Solution 1 - Bash

As suggested by Abel Muiño in comments, this may have been fixed in more recent Docker versions (I'm currently running 0.9.1).

But, if you're temporarily stuck like me with an older version, I did find a decent workaround to check if the container started by using docker inspect.

docker inspect returns a JSON object with a lot of info about the container, and in particular whether the container is currently running or not. The -f flag lets you easily extract the bits needed:

docker inspect -f {{.State.Running}} $CONTAINER_ID

docker inspect -f "{{.State.Running}}" $CONTAINER_ID

will return true or false.

Note that you probably want to sleep 1 (or more) between starting the container and checking if it is up. If there's something wrong with your setup it's possible that it would appear as 'running' for a very short time before actually exiting.

Solution 2 - Bash

To avoid parsing anything, you could use docker top, which returns 1 if the container is not running:

id=$(docker run mycontainer)
if ! docker top $id &>/dev/null
then
    echo "Container crashed unexpectedly..."
    return 1
fi

Solution 3 - Bash

We could use docker exec $id true 2>/dev/null || echo not running.

This command does not write to stdout, as "docker top" does. It writes to stderr when the container is not running, the same message as "docker top".

Solution 4 - Bash

Applying the suggestions aforementioned to a script.

1 - Create a script keepMyDockerUp.sh :

vi keepMyDockerUp.sh


#!/bin/bash
Container_ID=INSERT_YOUR_CONTAINER_ID HERE
result=$( docker inspect -f {{.State.Running}} $Container_ID)
echo "result is" $result
if [ $result = "true" ]
then
echo "docker is already running"
else
systemctl restart docker
docker start $Container_ID
fi

2 - Then simply add it to cron, so your script verifies whether your Docker container is up from time to time:

crontab -e

Go to the last line and add your script file. For example:

* * * * * /root/keepMyDockerUp.sh

3 - Save crontab and never worry about your Docker container being down again.

Hope it helps...

;-)

Solution 5 - Bash

I had to use:

$ docker inspect -f {{.State.Health.Status}} xxx

(the container was in state running but the service inside the container wasn't fully started.

Part of inspect output:

"State": {
    "Status": "running",
    "Running": true,
    "Paused": false,
    "Restarting": false,
    "OOMKilled": false,
    "Dead": false,
    "Pid": 1618,
    "ExitCode": 0,
    "Error": "",
    "StartedAt": "2019-03-08T10:39:24.061732398Z",
    "FinishedAt": "0001-01-01T00:00:00Z",
    "Health": {
        "Status": "starting",
        "FailingStreak": 0,
        "Log": []

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	Jules Olléon	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Bash	Jules Olléon	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Bash	pedroapero	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Bash	simohe	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 4 - Bash	Israel	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 5 - Bash	lvthillo	View Answer on Stackoverflow