22 Docker Commands You Must Know As a Beginner

Awoyemi Victor A.
2 min readMar 3, 2023

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What is Docker?

Docker is a lightweight virtualized environment called a container that is used for the development, deployment, and management of applications. It is mostly used as a platform for software development to create distributed applications that operate effectively in many environments.

Compared to VMs(Virtual Machines), Docker comes in handy with a lots of features and commands. To get started, you first have to get Docker installed directly on your Machines(Mac, Windows, Linux).

In this article, I have compiled the top 25 commands which I think every beginner Docker users must know. Remember to give me a clap 👏 if you find this helpful. Without wasting too much of our time, let’s get started.

1. To show all images in your Docker

$ docker images

2. To show all running containers

$ docker ps

3. To show all available running containers

$ docker ps -a

4. To delete an image (Note: The particular image must not have a container in use)

$ docker image rm <image_name>

5. To delete image even if it has a container in use

$ docker image rm <image_name> -f

6. To delete a container

$ docker container rm <container_name>

7. To remove all images, containers and volumes

$ docker system prune -a

8. To build image

$ docker build -t <name_of_image>

9. To build image with tag

$ docker build -t <name_of_image>:v1 .

10. To start a container

$ docker start <container_name>

11. To start an image with a specified port

$ docker run -name <container_name> -p 4000:4000 <image_name>

12. To stop a container

$ docker stop <container_name>

13. Deploying react.js application on docker

$ docker run -name <container_name> -p 4000:4000 -rm -v <app.js_path> -v <node_modules_path>:ro <image_name>

14. To start up a docker-compose.yaml file

$ docker-compose up

15. To shutdown container and delete it

$ docker-compose down

16. To delete container and images

$ docker-compose down -rmi all

17. To delete container, images and volumes

$ docker-compose down -rmi all -v

18. To clone imagename from hub

$ docker build -t <username>/<hub_name>

19. To login remotely from terminal

$ docker login

20. To push to dockerhub

$ docker push <image_name>

21. To pull latest nginx

$ docker pull nginx:latest

22. To run nginx container

$ docker run -p 8000:80 nginx

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