How to invoke NATS cli from a docker container running in detached mode

Question

I am new to NATS and decided to start playing with it using docker.

After pulling the official NATS image from docker hub (https://hub.docker.com/_/nats) I ran it as a container in detached mode using the following command:

docker container run --name my-nats -p 4222:4222 -d nats

Now if I want to access the NATS cli using the docker container exec command, how do I do it?

I tried several different ways all resulting in errors:

Attempt 1:

docker exec -ti my-nats bash

resulted in the following error:

... starting container process caused: exec: "bash": executable file not found in $PATH: unknown

Attempt 2:

docker exec -ti my-nats sh

resulted in the following error:

... starting container process caused: exec: "sh": executable file not found in $PATH: unknown

Attempt 3:

docker exec -ti my-nats /bin/bash

resulted in the following error:

... starting container process caused: exec: "/bin/bash": stat /bin/bash: no such file or directory: unknown

Attempt 4:

docker exec -ti my-nats /bin/sh

resulted in the following error:

... starting container process caused: exec: "/bin/sh": stat /bin/sh: no such file or directory: unknown

I could not find a lot of information specific to the NATS cli, so I tried all these options I saw online regarding other apps. I guess NATS has a different command to open the cli, but I just could not find it. I even tried escaping the backslashes which resulted in more or less the same errors.

I would deeply appreciate any help or guidance with discovering a way to work it out and access my container's cli.

Answer 1

It is based on alpine, use ash