If you are new to Docker and learning it by following various tutorials, you might come across the terms like start docker container, run docker container or create docker container.

These terms are enough to confuse a docker beginner because all three docker commands seem similar.

In fact, it is specially difficult to tell the difference between docker run and docker start.

Isn鈥檛 running a container the same as starting it? Not really.

Let me explain it to you.

Here鈥檚 what these commands do:

Docker create command creates a fresh new container from a docker image. However, it doesn鈥檛 run it immediately.

Docker start command will start any stopped container. If you used docker create command to create a container, you can start it with this command.

Docker run command is a combination of create and start as it creates a new container and starts it immediately. In fact, the docker run command can even pull an image from Docker Hub if it doesn鈥檛 find the mentioned image on your system.

Let鈥檚 see it with examples so that things are more clear to you.

Let鈥檚 see it with examples

Make sure that you have installed Docker if you want to follow the examples.

Let鈥檚 say that you download the Ubuntu image from Docker Hub using docker pull ubuntu command.

You can see all the available docker images on your system. I have only ubuntu in this example (to avoid confusion):

Now, create a new docker container named container-1 with the docker create command:

You can see that it has created a new container. If you try to see all the running containers, you won鈥檛 see container-1 because though it was created, it was never started.

If you check all the containers, irrespective of whether they are running or not, you鈥檒l see that container-1 has Created status:

Now let鈥檚 use the docker run command to create and run a container named container-2:

You can see that the container-2 is running as its status is Up:

Let鈥檚 stop this running container:

Now that we have a stopped container, you can start it again using the docker start command:

But what happens to the container-1 which was created using docker create command? You can start this container with docker start command and then use docker exec to run something specific with it.

I hope this article gave you a better understanding of docker run, docker start and docker create command. I'll advise learning about the container lifecycle for further understanding this topic.

If you have questions or suggestion, please feel free to leave a comment below.