network

`docker network`

Manages Docker networks — create, inspect, connect, disconnect, and remove user-defined bridges, overlays, or macvlan networks. Enables container-to-container DNS resolution by name.

Syntax

docker network COMMAND

Common flags

Flag	Purpose
-d, --driver	Driver to use (bridge, overlay, macvlan, host, none)
--subnet	Specify the subnet CIDR when creating
--attachable	Allow standalone containers to attach to an overlay network
--internal	Restrict external access to the network
-f, --force	Force removal (with rm subcommand)

Examples

docker network create app-net

Create a user-defined bridge network

docker network create -d overlay --attachable swarm-net

Attachable overlay for Swarm mode

docker network connect app-net web

Attach the web container to a network

docker network inspect bridge

Show subnet, gateway, and connected containers

Gotcha

The default bridge network does NOT provide DNS-based container name resolution — always create a user-defined bridge for multi-container apps. Overlay networks require Swarm mode initialized on the host.

Related commands

docker run

Creates and starts a new container from a specified image in a single step. This is the primary command for launching workloads and supports extensive configuration for networking, storage, and process control.

docker compose

Manages multi-container applications defined in a compose.yaml file. This is the Compose V2 plugin invoked via 'docker compose' (space); the legacy hyphenated 'docker-compose' binary is deprecated.

docker inspect

Returns low-level JSON metadata about Docker objects — containers, images, networks, volumes, and more. Supports Go template formatting for extracting specific fields.

docker volume

Manages persistent named volumes for containers — create, list, inspect, remove, and prune. Named volumes survive container removal and are the recommended storage mechanism over bind mounts for stateful data.

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