Why docker container exits immediately

I would like to extend or dare I say, improve answer mentioned by camposer

When you run

docker run -dit ubuntu

you are basically running the container in background in interactive mode.

When you attach and exit the container by CTRL+D (most common way to do it), you stop the container because you just killed the main process which you started your container with the above command.

Making advantage of an already running container, I would just fork another process of bash and get a pseudo TTY by running:

docker exec -it <container ID> /bin/bash

This did the trick for me:

docker run -dit ubuntu

After it, I checked for the processes running using:

docker ps -a

For attaching again the container

docker attach CONTAINER_NAME

TIP: For exiting without stopping the container type: ^P^Q

A docker container exits when its main process finishes.

In this case it will exit when your start-all.sh script ends. I don't know enough about hadoop to tell you how to do it in this case, but you need to either leave something running in the foreground or use a process manager such as runit or supervisord to run the processes.

I think you must be mistaken about it working if you don't specify -d; it should have exactly the same effect. I suspect you launched it with a slightly different command or using -it which will change things.

A simple solution may be to add something like:

while true; do sleep 1000; done

to the end of the script. I don't like this however, as the script should really be monitoring the processes it kicked off.

(I should say I stole that code from https://github.com/sequenceiq/hadoop-docker/blob/master/bootstrap.sh)