Interacting with Docker containers

Linux containers in general, and Docker specifically, have grown in popularity recently. Containers provide a fast path to resource isolation. Containers can be launched quickly as there is very little overhead. Utilities like Docker provide a lot of useful tooling around container management, such as a registry of images to use as the filesystem, tooling to build the images themselves, clustering orchestration, and so on. Docker has become one of the most popular ways to manage containers.

Ansible can interact with Docker in numerous ways as well. Notably, Ansible can be used to build images, to start or stop containers, to compose multiple container services, to connect to and interact with active containers, or even to discover inventory from. Modules, a connection plugin, and an inventory script are all provided by Ansible.

To demonstrate working with Docker, we'll explore a few use cases. The first use case is building a new image to use with Docker...