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Container (Docker)

SFBy Sitraka Forler · Lecturer, Durham Business School·Updated 13 September 2026· About this site

An isolated, portable bundle of an app and everything it needs to run.

A container runs an app with all it needs as an isolated process sharing the host kernel (the operating system's core), so it works the same on a laptop and in production. With Docker, you build an image (a read-only template) from a Dockerfile; each container is a runnable instance of that image. Unlike a virtual machine (VM), a container has no kernel of its own: on a Mac, Docker Desktop runs one in a Linux VM.

# pull the image if needed, then run a container from it
docker run --rm hello-world
# build an image from the Dockerfile in this folder
docker build -t my-app .
# start a container from your image
docker run --rm my-app
# list running containers
docker ps
# list images stored locally
docker images