Running a script inside a docker container using shell script

Question

You can run a command in a running container using docker exec [OPTIONS] CONTAINER COMMAND [ARG...]:

docker exec mycontainer /path/to/test.sh

And to run from a bash session:

docker exec -it mycontainer /bin/bash

From there you can run your script.

Assuming that your docker container is up and running, you can run commands as:

docker exec mycontainer /bin/sh -c "cmd1;cmd2;...;cmdn"

I was searching an answer for this same question and found ENTRYPOINT in Dockerfile solution for me.

Dockerfile

...
ENTRYPOINT /my-script.sh ; /my-script2.sh ; /bin/bash

Now the scripts are executed when I start the container and I get the bash prompt after the scripts has been executed.

In case you don't want (or have) a running container, you can call your script directly with the run command.

Remove the iterative tty -i -t arguments and use this:

    $ docker run ubuntu:bionic /bin/bash /path/to/script.sh

This will (didn't test) also work for other scripts:

    $ docker run ubuntu:bionic /usr/bin/python /path/to/script.py

You could also mount a local directory into your docker image and source the script in your .bashrc. Don't forget the script has to consist of functions unless you want it to execute on every new shell. (This is outdated see the update notice.)

I'm using this solution to be able to update the script outside of the docker instance. This way I don't have to rerun the image if changes occur, I just open a new shell. (Got rid of reopening a shell - see the update notice)

Here is how you bind your current directory:

docker run -it -v $PWD:/scripts $my_docker_build /bin/bash

Now your current directory is bound to /scripts of your docker instance.

(Outdated) To save your .bashrc changes commit your working image with this command:

docker commit $container_id $my_docker_build

Update

To solve the issue to open up a new shell for every change I now do the following:

In the dockerfile itself I add RUN echo "/scripts/bashrc" > /root/.bashrc". Inside zshrc I export the scripts directory to the path. The scripts directory now contains multiple files instead of one. Now I can directly call all scripts without having open a sub shell on every change.

BTW you can define the history file outside of your container too. This way it's not necessary to commit on a bash change anymore.

This command worked for me

cat local_file.sh | docker exec -i container_name bash