How to test your Docker install is working

Testing Docker, thankfully is one of the easiest things you can do – something you’d expect from Docker. With a simple one-liner you can test if your docker instance can reach the central repository, download images and run the image on the local machine.

If you haven’t installed Docker yet, see the installing Docker blog post.

To get started, open a terminal and connect to your docker instance. Once logged in, run the below command.

docker run hello-world

You’ll see some output from Docker detailing what it’s doing. This can be useful to diagnose any problems with your docker instance.

The text that you’re looking for is ‘Hello from Docker!’ – if you see that in the output then your Docker instance is up and running!

The full output will be something similar to the below:

Unable to find image 'hello-world:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/hello-world
1b930d010525: Pull complete
Digest: sha256:b8ba256769a0ac28dd126d584e0a2011cd2877f3f76e093a7ae560f2a5301c00
Status: Downloaded newer image for hello-world:latest

Hello from Docker!
This message shows that your installation appears to be working correctly.

To generate this message, Docker took the following steps:
 1. The Docker client contacted the Docker daemon.
 2. The Docker daemon pulled the "hello-world" image from the Docker Hub.
    (amd64)
 3. The Docker daemon created a new container from that image which runs the
    executable that produces the output you are currently reading.
 4. The Docker daemon streamed that output to the Docker client, which sent it
    to your terminal.

To try something more ambitious, you can run an Ubuntu container with:
 $ docker run -it ubuntu bash

Share images, automate workflows, and more with a free Docker ID:
 https://hub.docker.com/

For more examples and ideas, visit:
 https://docs.docker.com/get-started/