Docker: Ubuntu Hello World

Having an image identical to some already existing image does not give us a lot of value, so let's create make another small step. Let's add another instruction to the Dockerfile called CMD. The content of the CMD line is not executed when we build the image. Whatever comes after this CMD will be executed when we start the Docker container based on this image. Unless we override it.

In our case we just use the shell command echo to print "hello world" to the screen.


examples/hello-world/Dockerfile
FROM ubuntu:23.04
CMD echo hello world





$ docker build -t mydocker .
Once the image is ready we can run it and it will print out "hello world" as expected. You could distribute this image to show that you made it! Well, we have not seen yet how to distribute the image, but aside of that everything is fine. 

$ docker run --rm mydocker
hello world
The user of this new image can provide her own command on the command line, either another echo command or something totally different such as the pwd below. 

docker run --rm mydocker echo Other text
Other text



docker run --rm mydocker pwd
/

If we try to run it in interactive mode by supplying the -it flags, we'll find out that Docker still runs or CMD and exits. In order to really get into the interactive shell of this container we need to override the default CMD by a call to bash. 


docker run -it --rm mydocker bash