Is it possible to show the restart policy of a running Docker container?

You can get this via docker inspect.

Just the policy name:

docker inspect --format '\{\{.HostConfig.RestartPolicy.Name}}' <container-id>

Or the entire policy (including e.g. max retry count):

docker inspect --format '\{\{json .HostConfig.RestartPolicy}}' <container-id>

Yes, it is possible using docker inspect which is json format and just need to query it.

Here is relevant output of docker inspect for a running container zen_easley. Note to change container name as suitable for your environment.

• docker inspect zen_easley

"HostConfig": {
"Binds": null,
"ContainerIDFile": "",
"LogConfig": {
"Type": "json-file",
"Config": {}
},
"NetworkMode": "default",
"PortBindings": {},
"RestartPolicy": {
"Name": "no",
"MaximumRetryCount": 0
},
"AutoRemove": true,

You can just run the following command to get the same and its output.

$ docker inspect -f "\{\{ .HostConfig.RestartPolicy }}"  zen_easley
{no 0}

If you see RestartPolicy has two properties Name, MaximumRetryCount and no, 0 are the values respectively in the above output

You may also get the individual property value, say Name by using below command, appending .Name to the above command:

docker inspect -f "\{\{ .HostConfig.RestartPolicy.Name }}"  zen_easley
no

I did this little script to check all the containers and their policy:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
#Script to check the restart policy of the containers


readarray -t CONTAINERS < <(docker ps -a | grep -v NAMES | awk '{print $NF}')


for item in "${CONTAINERS[@]}"; do


#Hard-Bash way
#data=$(docker inspect "${item}" | grep -A 1 RestartPolicy | awk -F '"' '{print $4}' | tail -n 1)


#Docker-pr0 way
data=$(docker inspect -f "\{\{ .HostConfig.RestartPolicy.Name }}" "${item}")


echo "Container: ${item} / RestartPolicy: ${data}"
done

Hope it helps to somebody!

For single line of the code:

docker ps|grep -v CON|awk '{print $1}'|while read line; do  docker inspect -f "\{\{ .HostConfig.RestartPolicy.Name }}" $line |xargs echo $line ;done