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Determine whether a Docker container is running

·3 mins

You might want to find out if a Docker container named “elasticsearch” is currently running. There is a docker ps command to list all running containers in a table-like view. Lets assume there are two containers currently running, the result would look like this:

Ignoring the fact that it’s a quite wide table you might want to take the chance and use some good old tools. Yes, the classics like grep, awk, sed and the other usual suspects. You only have to find a line with the last column to equal or contain “elasticsearch”.

That’s not very exciting. A hipster developer these days would prefer to use JSON, because… JSON. Luckily, when using Docker we can use the Docker Remote API to perform the same request the docker ps command did. Combined with a great tool like jq you can try to get the same result. So, the first step would be to ask the Docker Remote API to list the running containers:

$ curl -X GET "http://172.17.42.1:2375/containers/json?all=false
[
  {
    "Command": "bash",
    "Created": 1410901503,
    "Id": "be2dd8aa82220a3b90a8712f47cfbbd482dbde7abd01f8c646bc3443a9ea04ab",
    "Image": "ubuntu:14.04",
    "Names": [
      "/silly_elion"
    ],
    "Ports": [],
    "Status": "Up 2 seconds"
  },
  {
    "Command": "/elasticsearch/bin/elasticsearch",
    "Created": 1410889877,
    "Id": "5250a96ebd16e72e664f31814f4a5a03df1ab7b50c52044f6a623002acca1ee0",
    "Image": "elasticsearch:latest",
    "Names": [
      "/elasticsearch"
    ],
    "Ports": [
      {
        "IP": "0.0.0.0",
        "PrivatePort": 9200,
        "PublicPort": 9200,
        "Type": "tcp"
      },
      {
        "IP": "0.0.0.0",
        "PrivatePort": 9300,
        "PublicPort": 9300,
        "Type": "tcp"
      }
    ],
    "Status": "Up 3 hours"
  }
]

We want to filter the Names array and test if one of both arrays from both containers equals our name “/elasticsearch”. The leading slash is an internal detail to Docker, which is usually removed by the native Docker client.

So, we extract the Names property from both objects and check whether they equal our desired name. This is the intermediate result:

$ curl -X GET "http://172.17.42.1:2375/containers/json?all=false" \
    | ./jq '.[].Names | .[] | . == "/elasticsearch"'
false
true

We get two results, for each container, and each Names entry. But we wanted a single result, which tells us if one of all containers is the eleasticsearch container. So, let’s combine the list to an array and reduce its entries to a single value:

$ curl -X GET "http://172.17.42.1:2375/containers/json?all=false" \ 
    | ./jq '[ .[].Names | .[] | . == "/elasticsearch" ] \
            | reduce .[] as $item (false; . | $item)'
true

Note the [...] around the filter of the previous step, which combines both results to a single array with two entries.

Well, the command doesn’t look very simple, but I would say by explicitly using JSON properties it’s far more stable than greping a pseudo-table. I also found the jqplay playground for checking the jq filter to be a big help. Just give it a try!