docker exec -it <container_id> /bin/bash Next up, if you can run the container (if it's crashed, you can restart it with docker start <container_id> ) then you can use this command to oppen a command line shell inside the container directly, and start digging around for further details by hand. Fortunately, there's a workaround: you can save the state of the shutdown container as a new image (with docker commit ) and then start that image using with a different command (e.g. /bin/bash ) to open a shell inside the container without the broken command running at all.