Using the Docker command line

In order to start using Docker CLI, you need to configure and bring up a Vagrant VM. If you are using macOS, the configuration process using Vagrant will look like this:

$ mkdir vagrant; cd vagrant
$ cat Vagrantfile
Vagrant.configure(2) do |config|
 config.vm.box = "centos/7"
 config.vm.hostname = 'node1.example.com'
 config.vm.network "private_network", type: "dhcp"
 config.vm.provision "shell", inline: "groupadd docker; usermod -aG docker vagrant; yum install docker -y; systemctl enable docker; systemctl start docker"
end
$ vagrant up 
$ vagrant ssh

Using Docker man, help, info

The Docker daemon listens on unix:///var/run/docker.sock but you can bind Docker to another host/port or a Unix socket. The Docker client (the docker utility) uses the Docker API to interact with the Docker daemon.

The Docker client supports dozens of commands, each with numerous options, so an attempt to list them all would just result in a copy of the CLI reference from the official documentation. Instead, we will provide you with the most useful subsets of commands to get you up and running.

You can always check available man pages for all Docker sub-commands using:

$ man -k docker

You will be able to see a list of man pages for Docker and all the sub-commands available:

$ man docker
$ man docker-info
$ man Dockerfile

Another way to get information regarding a command is to use docker COMMAND --help:

# docker info --help
Usage: docker info
Display system-wide information
--help             Print usage

The docker utility allows you to manage container infrastructure. All sub-commands can be grouped as follows:

Activity type	Related subcommands
Managing images	search, pull, push, rmi, images, tag, export, import, load, save
Managing containers	run, exec, ps, kill, stop, start
Building custom images	build, commit
Information gathering	info, inspect