It appeared that other zookeeper images cannot make a cluster or change configuration without bind-mounting config file.
This one can be configured with bind-mounting and with env variables. This image can even form zookeeper cluster from env variables only.
Zookeeper is installed from ubuntu repositories on top of 14.04.
docker run -d -p 2181:2181 -e ZK_CONFIG=clientPort=2181 -e ZK_ID=1 bobrik/zookeeper
Same as single node, but you should add more configuration to ZK_CONFIG,
some production-ready string could look like this for 3-node cluster:
tickTime=2000,initLimit=10,syncLimit=5,maxClientCnxns=8000,forceSync=no,autopurge.snapRetainCount=5,autopurge.purgeInterval=2,clientPort=2181,server.1=zk1.local:2888:3888,server.2=zk2.local:2888:3888,server.3=zk3:2888:3888
You should also expose ports 2888 and 3888
in addition to 2181 to make it work.
Each node should be launched with correct ZK_ID.
If you already have configuration file, you should mount it
to container's dir /etc/zookeeper/conf.
It is a great idea to persist data on host filesystem.
To do so, please bind-mount /var/lib/zookeeper for data
and /var/log/zookeeper for logs.