How can I know why a Docker container stopped?

Question

I have a Docker container that contains a JVM process. When the process ends the container completes and stops.

While thankfully rare, my JVM can go legs-up suddenly with a hard-failure, eg OutOfMemoryError . When this happens my container just stops, like a normal JVM exit.

I can have distributed logging, etc., for normal JVM logging, but in this hard-fail case I want to know the JVM's dying words, which are typically uttered on stderr.

Is there a way to know why my container stopped, look around in logs, stderr, or something along these lines?

Answer 1

You can run the docker logs [ContainerName] or docker logs [ContainerID] command even on stopped containers. You can see them with docker ps -a .

Source: the comment of Usman Ismail above: this is just a way to convert his comment into a proper answer.