Can I copy my container?

I just stumbled over this twitter post from Steve

And I asked myself the same question already some time ago. And guess what, this is super easy 😉

Stop and Commit the container you want to copy

You first need to stop your container you want to copy. If it is running of course 😉

Stop-BcContainer <ContainerToCopy>

This should not take too long.
After that you can use the “Docker commit” command to save the current state of this container to a new image.

docker commit <ContainerToCopy> backup:containertocopy

“backup:containertocopy” is the name of the new image. If you have the docker extension for vs code you will see your image in the side bar like that:

Create a new container from the image

I created a simple script with the New-BcContainerWizard for you to reuse. Note that you only need to pass your image name to the New-BCContainer command. The artifact url you dont need in this scenario 😉

$containerName = 'CopyOfSavedContainer'
$password = 'P@ssw0rd'
$securePassword = ConvertTo-SecureString -String $password -AsPlainText -Force
$credential = New-Object pscredential 'admin', $securePassword
$auth = 'UserPassword'
$licenseFile = 'PathToYourLicenseFile'
New-BcContainer `
    -accept_eula `
    -containerName $containerName `
    -credential $credential `
    -auth $auth `
    -imageName 'backup:containertocopy' `
    -licenseFile $licenseFile `
    -memoryLimit 8G `
    -updateHosts

This also should speed up your container creation process a lot as nothing needs to be installed inside the container 😉

Thanks for reading!