How to read files and stdout from a running Docker container

Question

How would I go about starting an application in my host machine in order to read files and stdout from a running docker container?

Essentially I want to do this:

Answer 1

A bit late but this is what I'm doing with journald. It's pretty powerful.

You need to be running your docker containers on an OS with systemd-journald.

docker run -d --log-driver=journald myapp

This pipes the whole lot into host's journald which takes care of stuff like log pruning, storage format etc and gives you some cool options for viewing them:

journalctl CONTAINER_NAME=myapp -f

which will feed it to your console as it is logged,

journalctl CONTAINER_NAME=myapp > output.log

which gives you the whole lot in a file to take away, or

journalctl CONTAINER_NAME=myapp --since=17:45

Plus you can still see the logs via docker logs .... if that's your preference.

No more > my.log or -v "/apps/myapp/logs:/logs" etc