The answers from this question do not work.
The docker container always exits before I can attach or won't accept the -t flag. I could list all of the commands I've tried, but it's a combination of start exec attach with various -it flags and /bin/bash.
How do I start an existing container into bash? Why is this so difficult? Is this an "improper" use of Docker?
EDITS:
I created the container with docker run ubuntu. The information about the container: 60b93bda690f ubuntu "/bin/bash" About an hour ago Exited (0) 50 minutes ago ecstatic_euclid
First of all, a container is not a virtual machine. A container is an isolation environment for running a process. The life-cycle of the container is bound to the process running inside it. When the process exits, the container also exits, and the isolation environment is gone. The meaning of "attach to container" or "enter an container" actually means you go inside the isolation environment of the running process, so if your process has been exited, your container has also been exited, thus there's no container for you to attach or enter. So the command of docker attach, docker exec are target at running container.
Which process will be started when you docker run is configured in a Dockerfile and built into a docker image. Take image ubuntu as an example, if you run docker inspect ubuntu, you'll find the following configs in the output:
"Cmd": ["/bin/bash"]
which means the process got started when you run docker run ubuntu is /bin/bash, but you're not in an interactive mode and does not allocate a tty to it, so the process exited immediately and the container exited. That's why you have no way to enter the container again.
To start a container and enter bash, just try:
docker run -it ubuntu
Then you'll be brought into the container shell. If you open another terminal and docker ps, you'll find the container is running and you can docker attach to it or docker exec -it <container_id> bash to enter it again.
You can also refer to this link for more info.