How do I make a Docker container start automatically on system boot

Question

Supposed I have a Docker container that I want to run  then I can call    docker run       and everything is fine  Is there a built-in way to run a container in a way that it will be restarted automatically  if the system crashes and reboots   If so  is this also available in Docker Compose

User · Answer

If you want the container to be started even if no user has performed a login (like the VirtualBox VM that I only start and don't want to login each time). Here are the steps I performed to for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. As an example, I installed a oracle db container:

$ docker pull alexeiled/docker-oracle-xe-11g
$ docker run -d --name=MYPROJECT_oracle_db --shm-size=2g -p 1521:1521 -p 8080:8080 alexeiled/docker-oracle-xe-11g
$ vim /etc/systemd/system/docker-MYPROJECT-oracle_db.service

and add the following content:

[Unit]
Description=Redis container
Requires=docker.service
After=docker.service

[Service]
Restart=always
ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker start -a MYPROJECT_oracle_db
ExecStop=/usr/bin/docker stop -t 2 MYPROJECT_oracle_db

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target

and enable the service at startup

sudo systemctl enable docker-MYPROJECT-oracle_db.service

For more informations https://docs.docker.com/engine/admin/host_integration/

User · Answer

This is what crontab is for    reboot sleep 10   docker start  lt container name gt  2 gt  amp 1    usr bin logger -t  docker start    Access your user crontab by crontab -e or show it with crontab -l or edit your system crontab at  etc crontab

User · Answer

You can run a container that restart always by    docker run -dit --restart unless-stopped  lt image name OR image hash gt   If you want to change a running container s configs  you should update it by    docker update --restart  lt options gt   lt container ID OR name gt   And if you want to see current policy of the container  run the following command before above at the first place  docker inspect gateway   grep RestartPolicy -A 3  After all  Not to forget to make installed docker daemon enable at system boot by    systemctl enable docker  To see a full list of restart policies  see  Restart Policies

User · Answer

To start a container and set it to restart automatically on system reboot use docker run -d --restart unless-stopped ecstatic ritchie  Where ecstatic ritchie is an example name specifying the container in interest  Use docker ps -a to list all container names  To make particular running containers start automatically on system reboot docker update --restart unless-stopped ecstatic ritchie  To make all running containers start automatically on system reboot docker update --restart unless-stopped   docker ps -q   See more on Docker homepage

User · Answer

You can use docker update --restart on-failure  lt container ID or name gt   On top of what the name suggests  on-failure will not only restart the container on failure  but also at system boot  Per the documentation  there are multiple restart options  Flag            Description no              Do not automatically restart the container   the default  on-failure      Restart the container if it exits due to an error  which manifests as a non-zero exit code  always          Always restart the container if it stops  If it is manually stopped  it is restarted only when Docker daemon restarts or the container itself is manually restarted   See the second bullet listed in restart policy details  unless-stopped  Similar to always  except that when the container is stopped  manually or otherwise   it is not restarted even after Docker daemon restarts

User · Answer

Yes  docker has restart policies such as docker run --restart always that will handle this  This is also available in the compose yml config file as restart  always

User · Answer

The default restart policy is no     For the created containers use docker update to update restart policy   docker update --restart always 0576df221c0b   0576df221c0b is the container id

User · Answer

I wanted to achieve on-boot container startup on Windows   Therefore  I just created a scheduled Task which launches on system boot  That task simply starts  Docker for Windows exe   or whatever is the name of your docker executable    Then  all containers with a restart policy of  always  will start up

User · Answer

I have a similar issue running Linux systems   After the system was booted  a container with a restart policy of  quot unless-stopped quot  would not restart automatically unless I typed a command that used docker in some way such as  quot docker ps quot   I was surprised as I expected that command to just report some status information   Next I tried the command  quot systemctl status docker quot    On a system where no docker commands had been run  this command reported the following    docker service - Docker Application Container Engine     Loaded  loaded   lib systemd system docker service  disabled  vendor preset  enabled        Active  inactive  dead     TriggeredBy    docker socket        Docs  https   docs docker com  On a system where  quot docker ps quot   had been run with no other Docker commands  I got the following    docker service - Docker Application Container Engine     Loaded  loaded   lib systemd system docker service  disabled  vendor preset  enabled       Active  active  running  since Sun 2020-11-22 08 33 23 PST  1h 25min ago  TriggeredBy    docker socket        Docs  https   docs docker com     Main PID  3135  dockerd        Tasks  13      Memory  116 9M      CGroup   system slice docker service               -3135  usr bin dockerd -H fd    --containerd  run containerd containerd sock       various messages not shown    The most likely explanation is that Docker waits for some docker command before fully initializing and starting containers   You could presumably run  quot docker ps quot  in a systemd unit file at a point after all the services your containers need have been initialized   I ve tested this by putting a file named docker-onboot service in the directory  lib systemd system with the following contents   Unit    This service is provided to force Docker containers   that should automatically restart to restart when the system   is booted  While the Docker daemon will start automatically    it will not be fully initialized until some Docker command   is actually run   This unit merely runs  quot docker ps quot   any   Docker command will result in the Docker daemon completing   its initialization  at which point all containers that can be   automatically restarted after booting will be restarted    Description Docker-Container Startup on Boot Requires docker socket After docker socket network-online target containerd service   Service  Type oneshot ExecStart  usr bin docker ps   Install   WantedBy multi-user target So far  one test  with this service enabled   the container started when the computer was booted   I did not try a dependency on docker service because docker service won t start until a docker command is run  The next test will be with the docker-onboot disabled  to see if the WantedBy dependency will automatically start it

User · Answer

More  gentle  mode from the documentation   docker run -dit --restart unless-stopped  lt image name gt

User · Answer

1  First of all  you must enable docker service on boot    sudo systemctl enable docker   2  Then if you have docker-compose  yml file add restart  always or if you have docker container add restart always like this   docker run --restart always  and run docker container  Make sure      If you manually stop a container  its restart policy is ignored until the Docker daemon restarts or the container is manually restarted    see this restart policy on Docker official page  3  If you want start docker-compose  all of the services run when you reboot your system So you run below command only once    docker-compose up -d

[docker] How do I make a Docker container start automatically on system boot?

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