Dmitri Korotkevitch walks us through creating a home lab with Docker containers:
Obviously, in the real life, we do not work with vanilla SQL Server installation. We need to customize it by changing SQL Server settings and logins, creating and/or restoring the databases and do other actions. There are a couple of ways how you can do that.
The first approach is customizing existing container manually and creating the image from it using docker container commit command. After that, you can start the new containers from created image the same way as we already discussed. We will cover a couple ways to move data to and from containers later.
There is the better way, however. You can automate this process by utilizing docker build command. The process is very simple. You just need to define DockerFile, which contains the reference to the main image and specifies the build actions. You can copy scripts and database backups into the image, run SQLCMD, BCP and PowerShell scripts there – you, pretty much, have the full control. Internally, Docker runs every command inside deployment containers (creating and destroying them during the process) saving the final one as the target image.
Read the whole thing.