Automatically Generate Human-Readable Container Names

If you don’t define a name for a docker container an automatically generated name will be created.

Create Three Containers

Create and start (docker run) a detacted (--detach) container using the nginx:latest Docker image. Run this three times.

docker run --detach nginx:latest
docker run --detach nginx:latest
docker run --detach nginx:latest

6b29f78dbf01f7642cca1c54f69e8c068e6048536ef3307cd2960d56192ca11
495ee8ab187a60a9a4f2ecbe40f9de944d597a9afec1be43826249609541d3b
6a96b04886182535b63dfe46111644626ff2f036b3c4cac6c9908100d27b2719

View Automatically Generated Names

Show the Docker containers that are running (docker ps).

Add (-a) to view all containers.

docker ps

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                       COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS               NAMES
6a96b0488618        nginx:latest                "/docker-entrypoint.…"   4 seconds ago       Up 2 seconds        80/tcp              nifty_antonelli
495ee8ab187a        nginx:latest                "/docker-entrypoint.…"   6 seconds ago       Up 4 seconds        80/tcp              silly_ramanujan
6b29f78dbf01        nginx:latest                "/docker-entrypoint.…"   8 seconds ago       Up 7 seconds        80/tcp              dazzling_diffie

In this example, the three automatically generated human-readable names are nifty_antonelli, silly_ramanujan, and dazzling_diffie.