What is the purpose of inspecting a Docker image?

Inspecting a Docker image serves the primary function of allowing users to view its metadata and configuration details. When you perform an inspection on a Docker image, you receive valuable insights into its layers, environment variables, commands, ports, and other characteristics that define how the image operates. This metadata is crucial for understanding how your application is set up within the container, including its dependencies and configurations.

Knowing the configuration details can also aid in troubleshooting and ensuring that the environment variables and settings align with your application’s requirements. This capability is essential for developers and system administrators who need to validate images before they deploy them or to ensure that the configurations support the intended runtime behavior.

In contrast, analyzing container performance metrics pertains to runtime containers rather than images, which are static by nature. Checking the runtime environment settings is relevant after a container has been created and is running, not during the inspection of an image. Finally, deleting a Docker image pertains to image management rather than inspection, which is purely about examining existing configurations and metadata.