Docker Basics: Image vs Container 🐳
When you start learning Docker, one of the first confusions is:
what is the difference between an Image and a Container?
Let’s break it down with a simple analogy.
📖 Image = Recipe
Think of an image as a recipe.
- It tells you what ingredients you need and how to cook them.
- It defines everything your app needs: code, dependencies, environment.
- But on its own, you can’t use it.
- A recipe is not food — just like an image is not a running app.
🍝 Container = Dish
Now imagine actually cooking the recipe.
- The container is the dish prepared from the recipe.
- It’s real, it exists, you can eat it (or run it).
- That’s your app actually running, isolated from the rest of your system.
👉 One Recipe → Many Dishes
The beauty of Docker is that:
- You can take one image (recipe).
- And create many containers (dishes).
- Each container runs independently, even if they come from the same image.
Example:
docker run nginx:latest
docker run nginx:latest
Here you just launched two containers from the same image (nginx).
🚀 Why it matters
Images are blueprints.
Containers are the actual running apps.
This distinction helps you understand how Docker scales apps and why you can run multiple containers from the same image.
💡 Next step: let’s actually run our first container with:
docker run hello-world
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