First of all, a container is not a virtual machine. A container is an isolation environment for running a process. The life-cycle of the container is bound to the process running inside it. When the process exits, the container also exits, and the isolation environment is gone. The meaning of “attach to container” or “enter an container” actually means you go inside the isolation environment of the running process, so if your process has been exited, your container has also been exited, thus there’s no container for you to attach
or enter
. So the command of docker attach
, docker exec
are target at running container.
Which process will be started when you docker run
is configured in a Dockerfile
and built into a docker image. Take image ubuntu
as an example, if you run docker inspect ubuntu
, you’ll find the following configs in the output:
"Cmd": ["/bin/bash"]
which means the process got started when you run docker run ubuntu
is /bin/bash
, but you’re not in an interactive mode and does not allocate a tty to it, so the process exited immediately and the container exited. That’s why you have no way to enter the container again.
To start a container and enter bash
, just try:
docker run -it ubuntu
Then you’ll be brought into the container shell. If you open another terminal and docker ps
, you’ll find the container is running and you can docker attach
to it or docker exec -it <container_id> bash
to enter it again.
You can also refer to this link for more info.