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Docker provides us with some useful commands that we can use to manage our images and containers, but some commands are not obvious. For example, we can use the Docker command docker psto display a list of running containers, or use the docker command docker ps -ato display a list of all containers, whether stopped or running.

One feature that is not obvious is to display a list of only stopped containers. In this tutorial, we will learn how to display a list of only stopped containers in Docker.

Pull the Nginx image from Docker Hub

In this tutorial, we will use the Nginx image to run containers from it and use these containers to achieve the goals of this article.

Open a new terminal window on your computer using the keyboard shortcut ALT+F12 and then use the following command to pull the Nginx image from the docker hub.

~$ docker pull nginx

Since we did not specify a tag, this command will pull the latest version of Nginx. We can view the download details in the terminal window, as shown below.

Using default tag: latest
latest: Pulling from library/nginx
e9995326b091: Pull complete
71689475aec2: Pull complete
f88a23025338: Pull complete
0df440342e26: Pull complete
eef26ceb3309: Pull complete
8e3ed6a9e43a: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:943c25b4b66b332184d5ba6bb18234273551593016c0e0ae906bab111548239f
Status: Downloaded newer image for nginx:latest
docker.io/library/nginx:latest

List Docker images

Once the download is complete, we can verify that the Nginx image has been downloaded using the following command which lists all images.

~$ docker image ls

If you have installed other images before, using this command will list them all. In our case, we have just displayed the image used in this tutorial to verify that the image has been downloaded.

The image details are as follows:

REPOSITORY                        TAG       IMAGE ID       CREATED       SIZE
nginx                             latest    76c69feac34e   2 days ago    142MB

Running a container from the Nginx image

For testing purposes, we will only run two containers named container-one and container-two . In the same terminal window, execute the following commands one after the other to run two containers using the nginx image.

Run container-one :

~$ docker run --name container-one -d -p 3000:80 nginx

Output:

9e70a29947c373df2abd4748271d252f297c6a06669f7cffb04fe95ee5fca671

Run container-two :

~$ docker run --name container-two -d -p 5000:80 nginx

Output:

43cd017b94062e47c6c3f868ed74fb5ca7920522e870eceb58115e388e9d43a5

请注意, the first container exposes port 3000 on the host to listen on port 80 on the container, while the second container exposes port 5000 on the host to listen on the same port as the previous container.

List running containers

In the previous section, we ran two containers named container-one and container-two . To verify that these containers are running, we can use the following command, which lists all running containers.

~$ docker ps

Output:

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE     COMMAND                  CREATED          STATUS          PORTS                  NAMES
43cd017b9406   nginx     "/docker-entrypoint.…"   4 minutes ago    Up 4 minutes    0.0.0.0:5000->80/tcp   container-two
9e70a29947c3   nginx     "/docker-entrypoint.…"   24 minutes ago   Up 24 minutes   0.0.0.0:3000->80/tcp   container-one

Stop a running container

Before listing the stopped containers, we have to stop a container first, we can use the following command to stop the container using its name. You can run and stop multiple containers freely.

~$ docker stop container-one

Output:

container-one

When we execute docker psthe command, we will find that only container-two is running. In the next section, we will learn how to list only stopped containers, which is the main goal of this tutorial.

Use the docker ps command to list stopped containers

docker psThe command has a --filter flag that we can specify to filter the containers based on a condition. The value of the --filter flag expects the condition that will be used to provide the output.

In the same terminal window, use the following command to filter for containers with a status of exited.

~$ docker ps --filter "status=exited"

Output:

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                   COMMAND                  CREATED          STATUS                      PORTS                    NAMES
9e70a29947c3   nginx                   "/docker-entrypoint.…"   48 minutes ago   Exited (0) 18 minutes ago                            container-one

Use the docker container ls command to list stopped containers

This command has the same syntax as the previous example. docker container lsThe command has a --filter flag that we can specify to filter containers based on a condition. Since the --filter flag is the same, we only need to provide the condition to filter containers with a status of exited, as follows.

~$ docker container ls --filter "status=exited"

Output:

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                   COMMAND                  CREATED          STATUS                      PORTS                    NAMES
9e70a29947c3   nginx                   "/docker-entrypoint.…"   48 minutes ago   Exited (0) 18 minutes ago                            container-one

请注意 The --filter flag should be provided as a key-value pair, if you have multiple filters make sure to provide multiple flags.

In this article, we used a filter called status to filter containers based on their status. However, the docker documentation provides other strategies that we can use to filter containers.

Summarize

In this tutorial, we learned how to leverage the Nginx container to list only stopped containers in Docker. The two methods covered include Listing Stopped Containers Using the ps Command and Listing Stopped Containers Using the containers ls command.

Both commands have a --filter flag that accepts key-value pairs to filter containers based on specific criteria.