Announcing Docker 1.1.0

The hardworking folk at Docker, Inc. are proud to announce the release of version 1.1.0 of Docker. We’ve made improvements throughout the Docker ecosystem, including updates to Docker Engine, Docker Hub, and our documentation.

Highlights include these new features:

New .dockerignore functionality

You can now add a .dockerignore file next to your `Dockerfile` and Docker will ignore files and directories specified in that file when sending the build context to the daemon.

Example: https://github.com/dotcloud/docker/blob/master/.dockerignore

Pause containers during commit

Doing a commit on a running container was not recommended because you could end up with files in an inconsistent state (for example, if they were being written during the commit). Containers are now paused when a commit is made to them.

You can disable this feature with docker commit --pause=false <container_id>.

Tailing logs

You can now tail the logs of a container. For example, you can get the last ten lines of a log by using docker logs --tail 10 <container_id>. You can also follow the logs of a container without having to read the whole log file with docker logs --tail 0 -f <container_id>.

Allow a tar file as context for docker build

You can now pass a tar archive to `docker build` as context. This can be used to automate docker builds, for example: cat context.tar | docker build - or docker run builder_image | docker build -

Bind mounting your whole filesystem in a container

/ is now allowed as source of --volumes. This means you can bind-mount your whole system in a container if you need to. For example: docker run -v /:/my_host ubuntu:ro ls /my_host. However, it is now forbidden to mount to /.

Other Improvements & Changes

• Port allocation has been improved. In the previous release, Docker could prevent you from starting a container with previously allocated ports which seemed to be in use when in fact they were not. This has been fixed.
• A bug in docker save was introduced in the last release. The docker save command could produce images with invalid metadata. The command now produces images with correct metadata.
• Running docker inspect in a container now returns which containers it is linked to.
• The docker commit flag has improved validation, to better prevent you from committing an image with a name such as  -m. Image names with dashes in them potentially conflict with command line flags.
• The API now has Improved status codes for  start and stop. Trying to start a running container will now return a 304 error.
• Performance has been improved overall. Starting the daemon is faster than in previous releases. The daemon’s performance has also been improved when it is working with large numbers of images and containers.
• Fixed an issue with white-spaces and multi-lines in Dockerfiles.

We hope you enjoy this release and find it useful. As always, don’t hesitate to contact us with questions, comments or kudos.