Connecting to a Container

Execute commands in running containers

The docker exec command is used to execute commands in running containers, and it has two modes:

• Interactive
• Remote execution

Interactive exec sessions connect your terminal to a shell process in the container and behave like remote SSH sessions. Remote execution mode lets you send commands to a running container and prints the output to your local terminal.

Run the following command to start an interactive exec session by creating a new shell process (sh) inside the webserver container and connecting our terminal to it. The -it flag makes it an interactive exec session, and the sh argument starts a new sh process inside the container. sh is a minimal shell program installed in the container.