I’ve been going over some demos for a presentation that I’ll be giving this year and I thought I’d write this quick post about something that keeps catching me out…

…but first, a bit of shameless self promotion. I’ll be giving my session on an Introduction to SQL Server & Containers at the following events this year:-

SQL Saturday Iceland on the 18th of March
SQLBits on the 8th of April
SQL Saturday Dublin on the 17th of June

Really looking forward to all three events, containers are a technology that I’ve become quite a fan of and I’m looking forward to sharing what I’ve learnt. So if you’re about at these events come and give my session a visit!

Anyway as I was running through my demos and building containers I was running the following code: –

docker run -d -p 15999:1433 --name testcontainer microsoft/mssql-server-windows

All looks good, apart from when I go to check to see if the container is running: –

I have to run the docker ps command with the -a flag (to show all containers, the default is to only show running containers). Which means my container isn’t running, something’s gone wrong.

So to see what’s happening I can run the docker logs command to see what’s up: –

ARGH! I forgot to specify -e ACCEPT_EULA=Y when building the container! This has caught me out more times than I care to admit but it’s cool that there’s a simple command that I can run in order to see what the issue is.

Or I could just build a custom image from a dockerfile and specify -e ACCEPT_EULA=Y in that and not have to worry anymore. I’ve detailed how to do that here.

Thanks for reading!