A shell script that uses curl to see if docker is up and running

isdockerlive.sh

#!/bin/bash

rep=$(curl -s --unix-socket /var/run/docker.sock http://ping > /dev/null)
status=$?

if [ "$status" == "7" ]; then
    echo 'not connected'
    exit 1
fi

echo 'connected'
exit 0

This is elegant thinking out of the box. Bravo!

Thanks, @vnijs here are the errors that docker ps -q will throw if docker is not running or booting up.

Error response from daemon: dial unix docker.raw.sock: connect: connection refused

Cannot connect to the Docker daemon at unix:///var/run/docker.sock. Is the docker daemon running?

OMG, I also found your answer on this stack overflow!!! 💥 https://stackoverflow.com/a/51251499/882371