This assumes you have installed Docker on Linux, Docker is running, and that you have created a container. The docker logs command is used to view a containers logs. You may want to first issue the docker ps command to get the name of the containers.

The docker ps command can be used to determine if the container is running.

docker ps

CONTAINER ID     IMAGE              COMMAND                 CREATED         STATUS     PORTS     NAMES
d937372c09ab9    b939aa938add9913   "/docker-entrypoin..."  6 minutes ago   Created              my-container

In this example, the logs for the container named my-container will be displayed.

docker logs my-container

The --follow option can be used to watch the logs in real time.

docker logs my-container --follow

The -t or --timestamps option can be included to include the datetime in the output.

docker logs my-container --timestamps

The --since and --until options can be included to only show events within a specified datetime.

docker logs my-container --since 2020-11-14T08:00:00 --until 2020-11-14T11:00:00

The --tail=10 option can be included to only list the last 10 messages in the log.

docker logs my-container --tail=10

You may need to use 2>&1 to grep the logs.

docker logs my-container 2>&1 | grep foo

The logs are written to a JSON log file.

~]$ sudo docker inspect my-container --format='{{.LogPath}}'
/var/lib/docker/containers/7b05e7ae67ec2869ed0ce6b5e9589e6bb65eda3d6345147d94457b277addc9d7/7b05e7ae67ec2869ed0ce6b5e9589e6bb65eda3d6345147d94457b277addc9d7-json.log