List of docker file instructions and its Brief Summary?

FROM

A FROM command allows you to create a base image such as an operating system, a programming language, etc. All the instructions executed after this command take place on this base image. It contains an image name and an optional tag name. If you already have the base image pulled previously in your local machine, it doesn’t pull a new one. There are several pre published docker base images available in the docker registry. You can also push your own customized base image inside the docker registry.

RUN

A RUN instruction is used to run specified commands. You can use several RUN instructions to run different commands. But it is an efficient approach to combine all the RUN instructions into a single one. Each RUN command creates a new cache layer or an intermediate image layer and hence chaining all of them into a single line, becomes efficient. However, chaining multiple RUN instructions could lead to cache bursts as well.

CMD

If you want to run a docker container by specifying a default command that gets executed for all the containers of that image by default, you can use a CMD command. In case you specify a command during the docker run command, it overrides the default one. Specifying more than one CMD instructions, will allow only the last one to get executed.

ENTRYPOINT

The difference between ENTRYPOINT and CMD is that, if you try to specify default arguments in the docker run command, it will not ignore the ENTRYPOINT arguments.

WORKDIR

You can specify your working directory inside the container using the WORKDIR instruction. Any other instruction after that in the docker file, will be executed on that particular working directory only.

COPY

This instruction allows you to copy a directory from your local machine to the docker container.

ADD

Similar to COPY instruction, you can use ADD to copy files and folders from your local machine to docker containers. However, ADD also allows you to copy files from a URL as well as a tar file.

EXPOSE

The EXPOSE instruction inside the docker file informs that the container is listening to the specified port in the network. The default protocol is TCP.