Docker container will automatically stop after "docker run -d"

According to this answer, adding the -t flag will prevent the container from exiting when running in the background. You can then use docker exec -i -t <image> /bin/bash to get into a shell prompt.

docker run -t -d <image> <command>

It seems that the -t option isn't documented very well, though the help says that it "allocates a pseudo-TTY."

Hi this issue is because docker containers exit if there is no running application in the container.

-d 

option is just to run a container in deamon mode.

So the trick to make your container continuously running is point to a shell file in docker which will keep your application running.You can try with a start.sh file

Eg: docker run -d centos sh /yourlocation/start.sh

This start.sh should point to a never ending application.

In case if you dont want any application to be running,you can install monit which will keep your docker container running. Please let us know if these two cases worked for you to keep your container running.

All the best

The centos dockerfile has a default command bash.

That means, when run in background (-d), the shell exits immediately.

Update 2017

More recent versions of docker authorize to run a container both in detached mode and in foreground mode (-t, -i or -it)

In that case, you don't need any additional command and this is enough:

docker run -t -d centos

The bash will wait in the background.
That was initially reported in kalyani-chaudhari's answer and detailed in jersey bean's answer.

vonc@voncvb:~$ d ps -a
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND             CREATED             STATUS              PORTS               NAMES
4a50fd9e9189        centos              "/bin/bash"         8 seconds ago       Up 2 seconds                            wonderful_wright

Note that for alpine, Marinos An reports in the comments:

docker run -t -d alpine/git does not keep the process up.
Had to do: docker run --entrypoint "/bin/sh" -it alpine/git

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Original answer (2015)

As mentioned in this article:

Instead of running with docker run -i -t image your-command, using -d is recommended because you can run your container with just one command and you don’t need to detach terminal of container by hitting Ctrl + P + Q.

However, there is a problem with -d option. Your container immediately stops unless the commands keep running in foreground.
Docker requires your command to keep running in the foreground. Otherwise, it thinks that your applications stops and shutdown the container.

The problem is that some application does not run in the foreground. How can we make it easier?

In this situation, you can add tail -f /dev/null to your command.
By doing this, even if your main command runs in the background, your container doesn’t stop because tail is keep running in the foreground.

So this would work:

docker run -d centos tail -f /dev/null

Or in Dockerfile:

ENTRYPOINT ["tail"]
CMD ["-f","/dev/null"]

A docker ps would show the centos container still running.

From there, you can attach to it or detach from it (or docker exec some commands).

Background

A Docker container runs a process (the "command" or "entrypoint") that keeps it alive. The container will continue to run as long as the command continues to run.

In your case, the command (/bin/bash, by default, on centos:latest) is exiting immediately (as bash does when it's not connected to a terminal and has nothing to run).

Normally, when you run a container in daemon mode (with -d), the container is running some sort of daemon process (like httpd). In this case, as long as the httpd daemon is running, the container will remain alive.

What you appear to be trying to do is to keep the container alive without a daemon process running inside the container. This is somewhat strange (because the container isn't doing anything useful until you interact with it, perhaps with docker exec), but there are certain cases where it might make sense to do something like this.

(Did you mean to get to a bash prompt inside the container? That's easy! docker run -it centos:latest)

Solution

A simple way to keep a container alive in daemon mode indefinitely is to run sleep infinity as the container's command. This does not rely doing strange things like allocating a TTY in daemon mode. Although it does rely on doing strange things like using sleep as your primary command.

$ docker run -d centos:latest sleep infinity
$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID  IMAGE         COMMAND          CREATED       STATUS       PORTS NAMES
d651c7a9e0ad  centos:latest "sleep infinity" 2 seconds ago Up 2 seconds       nervous_visvesvaraya

Alternative Solution

As indicated by cjsimon, the -t option allocates a "pseudo-tty". This tricks bash into continuing to run indefinitely because it thinks it is connected to an interactive TTY (even though you have no way to interact with that particular TTY if you don't pass -i). Anyway, this should do the trick too:

$ docker run -t -d centos:latest

Not 100% sure whether -t will produce other weird interactions; maybe leave a comment below if it does.