Is there any way to restart stopped containers instead of images?

[mviereck]

@ugallu wrote:

Is there any way to restart stopped containers with x11docker, instead of images? (I tried committing containers as images and running them, but it failed)

For some reasons I decided to work with images only instead of restarting containers. Most important, docker expects mounted volumes to exist on host even for stopped containers; this becomes an issue with X sockets in /tmp/.X11-unix. Those sockets only exist while the X server is up and running. After a reboot, docker misses this X socket and creates a useless and annoying folder in /tmp/.X11-unix as a replacement.

If you wish to have persistant changes in user configuration and files, x11docker provides options --home and --homedir. For changes in the system itself, especially installing additional applications, I recommend to create a new image. Example dockerfile:

FROM x11docker/xfce
RUN apt-get update
RUN apt-get install -y firefox

Build a new image based on this dockerfile, and you have a good and maintainable base.

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A possibility I did not test out well:

While the container is up and running, you can create a new image from the container with docker commit containernumber mynewimage. This new image can be started with x11docker.

Is there a special reason why you want to reuse containers instead of creating new ones?