Chapter 9. Managing Docker Containers

A Docker container is a sandbox for isolating applications. The container image stores the configuration for the container. This section shows how to use hammer to provision Docker containers. For web UI equivalents of the following procedures see Managing Containers in Managing Hosts.

In Red Hat Satellite, you can deploy containers only on a compute resource of the Docker provider type. See Preparing Container Hosts in Managing Hosts for instructions on how to prepare a container host. To register this host as a compute resource, issue the following command:

$ hammer compute-resource create
--name cr_name \
--organization-ids org_ID1,org_ID2... \
--location-ids loc_ID1,loc_ID2... \
--url cr_url \
--provider docker

Use the following syntax to provision a container on the compute resource:

$ hammer docker container create \
--name container_name \
--compute-resource-id cr_ID \
--repository-name repo_name \
--tag tag \
--command command

Find the compute resource ID in the output of hammer compute-resource list. Replace repo_name with the name of the synchronized repository that contains your docker images. This can be a custom repository pointing to Docker Hub or your internal registry (see Section 2.3.4, “Creating a Custom Repository”), or the official Red Hat image repository. If you provision from a Content View, replace repo_name with the name of the Content View. See Section 3.2.3, “Adding Docker Images to a Content View” for details on adding images to a Content View.

By starting a container you start the process specified with the --command option during the container creation. To start a container, issue the following command:

$ hammer docker container start --id container_ID

For the full list of container related options, see the output of the hammer docker container --help command.