When should I use Docker's container name?

Question

When I ran docker ps -a, I got

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE                         COMMAND                CREATED             STATUS                      PORTS               NAMES e3be2faeb751        centos:latest   touch /var/log/test   2 minutes ago       Exited (1) 2 minutes ago                        insane_kirch6 

What is the name, insane_kirch6, for?

Answer 1

You can name your own containers with --name when you use docker run. If you do not provide a name, Docker will generate a random one like the one you have.

Check their documentation for naming at Legacy container links, The importance of naming

Answer 2

And even more importantly, you can run named containers again later with start:

docker start --interactive named-containter