Configuring a container

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A ContainerDefinition describes a container: its image, its command, its environment, its ports, its mounts, and what "ready" means. CreateContainer turns it into a TemporaryContainer, which creates the container when you call StartAsync and removes it when you dispose it.

var definition = new ContainerDefinition(ImageSource.FromRegistry("redis:8"));
definition.Environment.Add("TZ", "UTC");
definition.Ports.Add(new ContainerPort(6379));
definition.WaitStrategies.Add(Wait.ForPort(6379));

await using var container = definition.CreateContainer();
await container.StartAsync();

A few rules hold for every setting:

The container owns a copy. CreateContainer copies the definition, so you can change it and create another container from it without affecting the first one. The copy the container owns, container.Definition, is read-only: changing it throws an InvalidOperationException.
To start from an existing definition, pass it to the copy constructor, new ContainerDefinition(other). The copy can be changed even when other belongs to a container.
Names are generated. A container with neither a Name nor a ReuseId gets a random name, so two containers created from the same definition never collide, and a container whose creation failed can still be found and removed. Set Name only when something outside your code needs to find the container by name.
Defaults are safe. Ports are published on the loopback address, and the runtime is detected automatically. See Ports and Container runtimes.

Pages of this group

Images: run an image from a registry, a Dockerfile, an archive or the local machine, and decide when it is pulled.
Command, environment and resources: the entrypoint, the command, the environment variables, the user, the labels, the resource limits and the network.
Ports: publish the ports of the container and find the host port they were given.
Volumes and mounts: share files with the host or between containers.
Wait strategies: decide when StartAsync considers the container ready.
Networks: create a temporary network and connect containers to several networks, with aliases.
Advanced options: capabilities, extra hosts, shared memory, ulimits, healthchecks, the stop signal, and the options the definition does not have.