Canister Status

Once we have a (locally) running canister, we can interact with it from the command-line using dfx. We can query call the management canister for example to retrieve information about the status of a canister.

Once you have a (locally) running canister, you can run the following command to get its status (assuming our canister is called motime in dfx.json)

dfx canister status motime

This should return information about our canister, like

• Controllers A list of principals that control the canister
• Memory size The working memory used by the canister
• Balance The cycles balance of the canister
• Module hash The wasm module hash of the canister

The canister status response contains more information, which we didn't describe here. For a full overview of the canister status response and other functions we could call on the management canister, we need to consider the Candid interface and corresponding Motoko code for that interface.

In chapter 8, we will look at how to call the management canister from within Motoko.