Sorry, should have asked for your css as well. As is, basically what you need to look at is giving your container div the style .container { width: 100%; } in your css and then the enclosed divs will inherit this as long as you don't give them their own width. You were also missing a few closing tags, and the </center> closes a <center> without it ever being open, at least in this section of code. I wasn't sure if you wanted the image in the same div that contains your content or separate, so I created two examples. I changed the width of the img to 100px simply because jsfiddle offers a small viewing area. Let me know if it's not what you're looking for.
This is how you can achieve your desired setup with Bootstrap 3:
<div class="container-fluid">
<div class="row"> <!-- Give this div your desired background color -->
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-12">
... your content here ...
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
The container-fluid part makes sure that you can change the background over the full width. The container part makes sure that your content is still wrapped in a fixed width.
This approach works, but personally I don't like all the nesting. However, I haven't found a better solution so far.
I'd wonder why someone would try to "override" the container width, since its purpose is to keep its content with some padding, but I had a similar situation (that's why I wanted to share my solution, even though there're answers).
In my situation, I wanted to have all content (of all pages) rendered inside a container, so this was the piece of code from my _Layout.cshtml:
In my Home Index page, I had a background header image I'd like to fill the whole screen width, so the solution was to make the Index.cshtml like this:
@section featured {
<!-- This content will be rendered outside the "container div" -->
<div class="intro-header">
<div class="container">SOME CONTENT WITH A NICE BACKGROUND</div>
</div>
}
<!-- The content below will be rendered INSIDE the "container div" -->
<div class="content-section-b">
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
MORE CONTENT
</div>
</div>
</div>
I think this is better than trying to make workarounds, since sections are made with the purpose of allowing (or forcing) views to dynamically replace some content in the layout.
CSS:.specialBackground{ background-color: gold; /*replace with own background settings*/ }
FURTHER INFO
DON'T USE NESTED CONTAINERS
Many people will (wrongly) suggest, that you should use nested containers. Well, you should NOT.
They are not ment to be nested. (See to "Containers" section in the docs)
HOW IT WORKS
div is a block element, which by default spans to the full width of a document body - there is the full-width feature. It also has a height of it's content (if you don't specify otherwise).
The bootstrap containers are not required to be direct children of a body, they are just containers with some padding and possibly some screen-width-variable fixed widths.
If a basic grid .container has some fixed width it is also auto-centered horizontally.
So there is no difference whether you put it as a:
Direct child of a body
Direct child of a basicdiv that is a direct child of a body.
By "basic" div I mean div that does not have a CSS altering his border, padding, dimensions, position or content size. Really just a HTML element with display: block; CSS and possibly background.
But of course setting vertical-like CSS (height, padding-top, ...) should not break the bootstrap grid :-)
The following answer is not exactly optimal by any measure, but I needed something that maintains its position within the container whilst it stretches the inner div fully.
Sometimes it's not possible to close the content container.
The solution we are using is a bit different but prevent a overflow because of the
firefox scrollbar size!