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In Docker, there are multiple ways to check the status of a container. When displaying this information, we can also check if the Docker container is running.

This article will discuss the commands to check if a Docker container is running.

Check if the Docker container is running

In Docker, we have multiple commands to check the status of all created containers. In the next section, we will list various examples of these commands.

docker ps

In Docker, we have a docker pscommand called which lists all containers. If you have received Docker training, docker ps may have become a part of the basic Docker lifecycle.

docker psThe command has several options; however, the two most important ones will be discussed in this section.

The first is the --all or -a option to the command that shows all containers. By default, running the command without the -a option will only show the running containers.

Sample code:

docker ps -a
docker ps

Output:

Furthermore, we can use an additional option to only show running containers. For example, we can use the --filter option to only find containers with status equal to running.

Sample code:

docker ps -a --filter status=running

Output:

The above command is similar to docker container ls -athe command, which lists all containers and their status at the container level.

Bash and docker inspect

Another method we can use to display a running container is programmatically. For example, we can use docker inspect to list the properties of a container.

Since the above command has a JSON output, we can use it with bash.

Sample code:

if [ $(docker inspect -f '{{.State.Running}}' "zen_dirac") = "true" ]; then echo Running; else echo NotRunning; fi

The following code snippet searches for a specific container named zen_dirac and its State.Running property. If the property is equal to True, the command will display the final output Running, otherwise it will display NotRunning.

This code snippet can be helpful if we are managing hundreds of running containers and only need information about a single container. In this case, our zen_dirac container is running, so it should produce the output of Running in our command line.

Output:

Running

docker info

Additionally, if we need a high-level summary report of the containers, we can use docker infothe command. docker infoThe command displays system-wide information, including several running containers.

This command is useful if we don’t need to enter the name of the container but want to check if the container is running.

Sample code:

docker info

Output: