Docker curl

In the previous example we saw that we can use commands other than echo, but what if we would like to use curl for example? It will fail because curl is not installed in the image.

• Let's try to use curl

$ docker run  --rm ubuntu:23.04 curl https://code-maven.com/
docker: Error response from daemon: OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:349: starting container process caused "exec: \"curl\": executable file not found in $PATH": unknown.

To install it we need to add RUN commands. (Yeah, I know the name might be a bit confusing, but think about it from the point of view of the build process. We would like to run something during the build process.)

In order to install the curl package in Ubuntu we need to execute the apt-get install -y curl command. (The -y flag is there so apt-get will not ask for confirmation.) However before we can execute that command we need to download the list of all the available packages. We do that by running (here is that word!) the apt-get update command.

We don't have a CMD as we don't have a default operation.

FROM ubuntu:23.04

RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y curl

We can build the image the same way we built the previous one.

$ docker build -t mydocker .

Then we can run it. This time it will execute the curl command.

$ docker run  --rm mydocker curl https://code-maven.com/