How can I wait for a docker container to be up and running?

If you don't want to expose the ports, as is the case if you plan to link the container and might be running multiple instances for testing, then I found this was a good way to do it in one line :) This example is based on waiting for ElasticSearch to be ready:

docker inspect --format '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}:9200' elasticsearch | xargs wget --retry-connrefused --tries=5 -q --wait=3 --spider

This requires wget to be available, which is standard on Ubuntu. It will retry 5 times, 3 seconds between tries, even if the connection is refused, and also does not download anything.

As commented in a similar issue for docker 1.12

HEALTHCHECK support is merged upstream as per docker/docker#23218 - this can be considered to determine when a container is healthy prior to starting the next in the order

This is available since docker 1.12rc3 (2016-07-14)

docker-compose is in the process of supporting a functionality to wait for specific conditions.

It uses libcompose (so I don't have to rebuild the docker interaction) and adds a bunch of config commands for this. Check it out here: https://github.com/dansteen/controlled-compose

You can use it in Dockerfile like this:

HEALTHCHECK --interval=5m --timeout=3s \
  CMD curl -f http://localhost/ || exit 1

Official docs: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/#/healthcheck

Found this simple solution, been looking for something better but no luck...

until [ "`docker inspect -f {{.State.Running}} CONTAINERNAME`"=="true" ]; do
    sleep 0.1;
done;

or if you want to wait until the container is reporting as healthy (assuming you have a healthcheck)

until [ "`docker inspect -f {{.State.Health.Status}} CONTAINERNAME`"=="healthy" ]; do
    sleep 0.1;
done;