container/docs/container-inspection.md

Inspecting containers and images

Get detailed, machine-readable information about your containers and images.

Get container or image details

container image list and container list provide basic information for all of your images and containers. You can also use list and inspect commands to print detailed machine-readable output for resources.

Use the inspect command and send the result to the jq command to get pretty-printed JSON for the images or containers that you specify:

% container image inspect web-test | jq
[
  {
    "configuration": {
      "name": "web-test:latest",
...
    },
    "variants": [
      {
        "platform": {
          "os": "linux",
          "architecture": "arm64"
        },
        "config": {
          "created": "2025-05-08T22:27:23Z",
          "architecture": "arm64",
...
% container inspect my-web-server | jq
[
  {
    "configuration": {
      "mounts": [],
      "id": "my-web-server",
      "resources": {
        "cpus": 4,
        "memoryInBytes": 1073741824,
      },
...
    },
    "status": {
      "state": "running",
      "networks": [
        {
          "ipv4Address": "192.168.64.3/24",
          "ipv4Gateway": "192.168.64.1",
          "hostname": "my-web-server.test.",
          "network": "default"
        }
      ],
...
    }
  }
]

Use the list command with the --format option to display information for all images or containers. In this example, the --all option shows stopped as well as running containers, and jq selects the IP address for each running container:

% container ls --format json --all | jq '.[] | select ( .status.state == "running" ) | [ .configuration.id, .status.networks[0].ipv4Address ]'
[
  "my-web-server",
  "192.168.64.3/24"
]
[
  "buildkit",
  "192.168.64.2/24"
]

See Networking for how to publish ports, reach the host from a container, set a custom MAC address, and create isolated networks.