Using names in Docker

So far, when we operated on the containers, we always used autogenerated names. This approach has some advantages, such as the names being unique (no naming conflicts) and automatic (no need to do anything). In many cases, however, it's better to give a real user-friendly name for the container or the image.

Naming containers

There are two good reasons to name the container: convenience and the possibility of automation:

• Convenience, because it's simpler to make any operations on the container addressing it by name than checking the hashes or the autogenerated name
• Automation, because sometimes we would like to depend on the specific naming of the container

For example, we would like to have containers that depend on each other and to have one linked to another. Therefore, we need to know their names.

To name a container, we use the --name parameter:

$ docker run -d --name tomcat tomcat

We can check (by docker ps) that the container has a meaningful name. Also, as a result...