Why does MSSQL in Docker return "The last operation was terminated because the user pressed CTRL+C" on sql queries?

You should use docker-compose, I'm sure it will make your life easier. My guess is you're getting an error without actually knowing it. First time I tried, I used an unsafe password which didn't meet security requirements and I got this error:

ERROR: Unable to set system administrator password: Password validation failed. The password does not meet SQL Server password policy requirements because it is not complex enough. The password must be at least 8 characters long and contain characters from three of the following four sets: Uppercase letters, Lowercase letters, Base 10 digits, and Symbols..

I see your password is strong, but note that you have a * in your password, which may be executed if not correctly escaped.

Or the server is just not started when running with your command line, example:

# example of a failing attemptdocker run -it --rm -e 'ACCEPT_EULA=Y' -e 'SA_PASSWORD=GitGood*0987654321' -p 1433:1433 microsoft/mssql-server-linux:2017-CU7 bash# wait until you're inside the container, then check if server is runningapt-get update && apt-get install -y nmapnmap -Pn localhost -p 1433

If it's not running, you'll see something like that:

Starting Nmap 7.01 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2018-08-27 06:12 UTCNmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1)Host is up (0.000083s latency).Other addresses for localhost (not scanned): ::1PORT     STATE  SERVICE1433/tcp closed ms-sql-sNmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.38 seconds

Enough with the intro, here's a working solution:

docker-compose.yml

version: '2'services:  db:    image: microsoft/mssql-server-linux:2017-CU7    container_name: beep-boop-boop    ports:      - 1443:1443    environment:      ACCEPT_EULA: Y      SA_PASSWORD: GitGood*0987654321

Then run the following commands and wait until the image is ready:

docker-compose up -ddocker-compose logs -f &

• up -d to demonize the container so it keeps running in the background.
• logs -f will read logs and follow (similar to what tail -f does)
• & to run the command in the background so we don't need to use a new shell

Now get a bash running inside that container like this:

docker-compose exec db bash

Once inside the image, you can run your commands

/opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -U SA -P $SA_PASSWORD -Q "CREATE DATABASE test;"/opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -U SA -P $SA_PASSWORD -Q "SELECT name FROM master.sys.databases"

Note how I reused the SA_PASSWORD environment variable here so I didn't need to retype the password.

Now enjoy the result

name--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------mastertempdbmodelmsdbtest(5 rows affected)

For a proper setup, I recommend replacing the environment key with the following lines in docker-compose.yml:

env_file:  - .env

This way, you can store your secrets outside of your docker-compose.yml and also make sure you don't track .env in your version control (you should add .env to your .gitignore and provide a .env.example in your repository with proper documentation.

Here's an example project which confirms it works in Travis-CI:
https://github.com/GabLeRoux/mssql-docker-compose-example

Other improvements

There are probably some other ways to accomplish this with one liners, but for readability, it's often better to just use some scripts. In the repo, I took a few shortcuts such as sleep 10 in run.sh. This could be improved by actually waiting until the db is up with a proper way. The initialization script could also be part of an entrypoint.sh, etc. Hope it gets you started 🍻