Retrieving container logs

It is a best practice for any good application to generate some logging information that developers and operators alike can use to find out what the application is doing at a given time, and whether there are any problems to help pinpoint the root cause of the issue.

When running inside a container, the application should preferably output the log items to STDOUT and STDERR and not into a file. If the logging output is directed to STDOUT and STDERR, then Docker can collect this information and keep it ready for consumption by a user or any other external system.

To access the logs of a given container, we can use the docker container logs command. If, for example, we want to retrieve the logs of our quotes container, we can use the following expression:

$ docker container logs quotes

This will retrieve the whole log produced by the application from the very beginning of its existence.

Note

Stop, wait a second—this is not quite true, what I just said. By default, Docker...