A quick overview of day-to-day Docker Commands

Docker is a tool that makes development much more portable and manageable. By creating and managing Docker containers, we can separate applications into their own little container and control them with ease.

docker build

Example: docker build -t myImage .

This command allows you to build docker images, which are used to build containers. It may be easier to visualize Docker containers as an instance of the image, sort of like a virtual machine.

Normally you would want to tag the docker image with the -t argument so that referencing docker images would be a breeze. In the example above, I would be creating an image called myImage.

docker rmi {imageName}

Example: docker rmi myImage

This command simply removes the Docker image. You can enter in the image reference ID or the tag name to remove the image.

Often times, you will have conflicts when trying to remove Docker images. This is most likely because a Docker container is referencing the Docker image. In this situation, the best thing to do is to remove the Docker container first, then remove the Docker image. There may be multiple Docker containers referencing a single Docker image.