This assumes you have installed Docker on Linux, Docker is running and that you have created a container.

A Docker image contains the code used to create a Docker container, such as creating a Nginx web server, or a mySQL server, or a home grown app, and the list goes on. In this way, an image is like a template used to create a container. An image is kind of like a virtual machine, but much more light weight, using significantly less storage a memory (containers are usually megabytes in size).

The docker start command is used to start a container. In this example, the container named my-container will be started.

docker start my-container

The docker ps command can be used to determine if the container is running. If the status of the container is "Exited", use the docker logs command to determine why the container has exited.

docker ps

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

The -a or --attach option can be used to print stdout and stderr to the console.

docker start --attach my-container