Generally most containers are by default set not to start automatically.

Ther eare 3 settings for the "RestartPolicy" of containers: 

    no: Do not automatically restart the container (default).
    always: Always restart the container regardless of the exit status.
    unless-stopped: Always restart the container unless it is explicitly stopped.
    on-failure: Restart the container only if it exits with a non-zero status

Here is how you can see the policy:

docker ps -aq | xargs -I {} docker inspect --format='{{.Name}}: {{.HostConfig.RestartPolicy.Name}}' {}
 

We can see the output of all containers on the node and in the case below we see that all 3 are set to "no".

/festive_wiles: no
/magical_goldberg: no
/angry_hamilton: no

Say if we wanted "festive_wiles" to always be running (eg. if the server/node is rebooted we want the container to startup automatically):

docker update --restart=always festive_wiles

How can set these startup/restart settings when creating the container?

We just specify --restart=

docker run --name YourContainerName --restart=always -d nginx

Latest Articles