Get docker container id from container name

Question

What is the command to get the docker container id from the container name?

Answer 1

The simplest way I can think of is to parse the output of docker ps

Let's run the latest ubuntu image interactively and connect to it

docker run -it ubuntu /bin/bash

If you run docker ps in another terminal you can see something like

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND             CREATED             STATUS              PORTS               NAMES
8fddbcbb101c        ubuntu:latest       "/bin/bash"         10 minutes ago      Up 10 minutes                           gloomy_pasteur

Unfortunately, parsing this format isn't easy since they uses spaces to manually align stuff

$ sudo docker ps | sed -e 's/ /@/g'
CONTAINER@ID@@@@@@@@IMAGE@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@COMMAND@@@@@@@@@@@@@CREATED@@@@@@@@@@@@@STATUS@@@@@@@@@@@@@@PORTS@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@NAMES
8fddbcbb101c@@@@@@@@ubuntu:latest@@@@@@@"/bin/bash"@@@@@@@@@13@minutes@ago@@@@@@Up@13@minutes@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@gloomy_pasteur@@@@@@

Here is a script that converts the output to JSON.

https://gist.github.com/mminer/a08566f13ef687c17b39

Actually, the output is a bit more convenient to work with than that. Every field is 20 characters wide. [['CONTAINER ID',0],['IMAGE',20],['COMMAND',40],['CREATED',60],['STATUS',80],['PORTS',100],['NAMES',120]]