I am trying to stop the docker container automatically after 1 hour. I mean, if there is no process going on or the container is idle for 1 hour, then stop that container. Is this possible to do it programmatically within the Dockfile? Any thoughts would be helpful.
Thanks in advance.
The closest solution that fits your problem supported by Dockerfile would be HEALTHCHECK directive e.g. HEALTHCHECK [OPTIONS] CMD command . Here you can specify interval (e.g. 1 hour) and time out.
--interval=DURATION (default: 30s)
--timeout=DURATION (default: 30s)
--start-period=DURATION (default: 0s)
--retries=N (default: 3)
Other than that you would have to create custom shell script that is triggered by cronjob every 1 hour. In this script you would stop foreground process and by that stooping the running container.
As far as I know such a scenario is not part of the docker workflow.
The container is alive a long as its main process is alive. When that project (PID: 1) exits (with error or success) then the container also stops.
So the only way I see is to either build this logic inside your program (the main process in the container) or wrap the program in a shell script that kills the process based on some rule (like no log entries for a certain amount of time).