Docker Cookbook

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Figure 7-5. Starting a container via the Rancher UI
At this stage, you have a working Rancher test bed. You can explore the dashboard.
The Containers tab lists all your running containers. You can open a shell into a con‐
tainer, and start/stop it. The Volumes tab lists the volumes currently being used; vol‐
ume manipulation through the dashboard is limited at this time. Finally, you can
define an existing private registry, or define load-balancers.
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Figure 7-6. Rancher dashboard with running container
Discussion
So far, you’ve done everything by using the dashboard. Rancher also exposes a REST
API to manage all its resources. To use the API, you need to generate a set of API
access and secret keys. This is done by clicking the user icon at the top right of the
dashboard and selecting the API & Keys option. The API is not documented on the
GitHub page, but the dashboard offers a nice API explorer.
You can manage a running container through the dashboard. By clicking the con‐
tainer, you will see an option to View in API. This redirects you to the API explorer.
This explorer features the JSON object describing the container as well as a set of
actions that can be performed (green boxes in the UI). Selecting one of the actions
opens a new window that will show you the API request that you can make. This is a
perfect way to learn the API and possibly write your own client. 
Figure 7-7
 is a snap‐
shot of a request to stop a container.
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Figure 7-7. Rancher API request example