While getting familiar with different ways of using Docker I have bumped into a few pretty useful containers.

Base for Microcontainers

A good BusyBox based container is progrium/busybox. It contains a package manager (opkg) and includes most of the libraries to enable running applications on top of it. It’s decently sized at about 4.8 MB.

Base for volume containers

As volume containers don’t need any functionality, but you can’t build them on top of the scratch container, the next best alternative is tianon/true.

Getting Ubuntu Utopic to stay alive

When working in an environment where it would be useful to leave a container running a fully fledged OS running in the background so that you can later docker exec into it consider doing the following:

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docker run -d --name ubuntu ubuntu:utopic sleep infinity
docker exec -ti ubuntu /bin/bash

This should leave the container running but also cause no CPU strain as it will be sleeping before another shell is opened to it using the docker exec command.