How to run a container?

[Luxvao]

I have Rancher Desktop with containerd and nerdctl installed and I created a container with the name maindebian (nerdctl run -it --name maindebian debian), then I installed some tools on it, but I cant seem to find a way to run that exact container after I exited it. So if I run that command and I exit the container (so I stop it) and then I want to run it again I don't know how (I tried nerdctl run maindebian, but it tries to search for that image on docker.io is there a flag to disable searching on docker.io for that command?).
EDIT: I tried nerdctl start <container_name> but it gave me this error: FATA[0000] failed to create shim: OCI runtime create failed: cannot allocate tty if runc will detach without setting console socket: unknown
Thanks in advance

[adamkpickering]

The only way I'm aware of doing this is to run your container in daemon mode, i.e.

nerdctl run -d --name maindebian debian /bin/sleep inf

You can then get a shell in your container with

nerdctl exec -it maindebian /bin/sh

The /bin/sleep inf is there because the container needs to have some active process, otherwise it just exits. A better thing to run would probably be the system init, though I'm not sure how that would work out with this image. I used to do this successfully with an alpine image - see https://github.com/adamkpickering/alpine-dev for my setup.

Also note you can then nerdctl start and nerdctl stop the running container. And you can install any dependencies you want in the Dockerfile. Handy stuff.

[Luxvao]

This seemed to work, thanks! The only thing that's bothering me it that nerdctl start doesn't support interactive or tty. I hope it gets it at some point.

[Luxvao]

ALSO I ran "clear" in the container that I set up with your previous commands... got this error: TERM environment variable not set.
Hopefully you can help.

[adamkpickering]

You should be able to do nerdctl start ... and then nerdctl exec ..., just the same as you did nerdctl run ... and then nerdctl exec .... As for the TERM env var, you might find this link helpful. I would just try setting it to xterm-256color and seeing what happens.