Today I was wondering about Docker default container names. They’re cool enough to have caught my attention during the first hour of playing with Docker. furious_heisenberg, agitated_darwin, romantic_curie… who would come up with something like that?
Docker default container names
When you create a new Docker container and don’t give a custom name (by passing --name <name> on the CLI) Docker generates a name for you. For all commands you later run that interact with the container you can either use its hash ID or its name. So yes, the name is quite important.
How does Docker do that?
Of course I wanted to know how Docker generates default container names. I found the code in their GitHub repository – and learned that they use Go! In fact, over 90% of the Docker code is written in Go. And look at this gem towards the end of the generator.
if name == "boring_wozniak" /* Steve Wozniak is not boring */ {
goto begin
}But what good is a cool name generator if it’s not publicly available on the Internet as a service these days? So, here it is:
I came across your site trying to figure out why Docker landed on this convention of generating semi-random names. Where did this idea come from?
The idea is to make hashes easier to read and remember for humans. As a matter of fact, I wrote a similar library, with some extra features: https://github.com/jjmontesl/codenamize .
Thanks for taking the time to publish this Marcel – great service!
Thanks Marcel. Added a little fun to my deployment.
I made a Javascript version module of this to use for my own projects: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@afuggini/namegenerator