How to use nerdctl if you are familiar with Docker CLI

🚧 Work in progress... This is a draft version of the lesson about nerdctl. Please, consider supporting the development of this course on Patreon to help me finish this lesson faster.

nerdctl is a relatively new command-line client for containerd. Unlike ctr, nerdctl aims to be user-friendly and Docker-compatible. To some extent, nerdctl + containerd can seamlessly replace docker + dockerd. However, this does not seem to be the main goal of the project.

From the basic usage standpoint, comparing to ctr, nerdctl supports:

Image building with nerdctl build (BuildKit required)
Container networking management
Docker Compose with nerdctl compose up

And the coolest part about it is that nerdctl tries to provide the identical to docker (and podman) command-line UX. So, if you are familiar with docker (or podman) CLI, you are already familiar with nerdctl.

nerdctl run -d -p 8080:80 --name nginx3 nginx