I'm in the process of containerizing a service which monitors other services, many of which are also running on containers. Right now, it runs docker inspect from a Python subprocess on the host to monitor other services' containers. How can I get similar information from within another container?
I've considered running the same commands on the host via ssh, but it seems like there should be a better way. I can't be the first person to want to have one container monitor others, but all I find on the web is 3rd party solutions, which seem overkill for the problem at hand.
You can mount the docker socket inside the container that contains your python program.
docker run -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock my-python-program
Related
I am quite new to the docker topics and I have a question of connecting container services with traditional ones.
Currently I am thinking of replacing an traditional grafana installation (directly on a linux server) with a grafana docker container.
In grafana I have to connect to different data sources like a mysql instance, a Winsows SQL Database and so on. So grafana is doing a pull of data. All these data sources reside (and will still reside) on other hosts and they are not containers.
So how can I implement that my container is able to communicate with this data sources? Is it possible by default or do I have to implement a special kind of network? I saw that there is an option called macvlan...is that the correct way?
BR
Jan
This should work out of the box, as far as I understand. At least, I'm using Grafana inside a docker container and it works perfectly.
You can test a connectivity from inside your docker container to some external resource by opening a container shell like this:
docker exec -it <container ID> /bin/bash
And then
root#a9cbebfc4564:/# curl google.com
Or
root#a9cbebfc4564:/# ping <bla-bla>
Commands above depend on a docker image environment (like OS or installed software), but this can be solved in a same was as you can do on a regular Unix env
P.S. I encountered a docker2host connection issue once, but it was due to incorrect firewall configuration on a host side.
Since you are replacing a traditional installation, you can start with host networking. This mode give you same connectivity experience as installing on the host. A quick start is as simple as:
docker run --network host grafana/grafana
Notice there's no need to --publish or --publish-all ports as the Grafana container now share the host network.
I have two docker images:
CLI tool
Webserver
The CLI tool is a very heavy docker file which takes hours to compile. I am trying to call the CLI tool from the webserver, but not sure how to go from here. Is there a way to make the command created in 1 available in 2?
At this point I tried working with volumes, but no luck. Thanks!
The design of Docker sort-of assumes that containers communicate through a network, not through the command line. So the cleanest solution is to create a simple microservice that wraps the CLI tool and can be called through HTTP.
As a quick and dirty hack, you could also use sshd as such a microservice without writing any code.
An alternative that doesn't involve the network is to make the socket of the Docker daemon available in the webserver container using a bind mount:
docker run -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock ...
Then you should be able to communicate with the host daemon from within the container, provided that you have installed the docker command line tool in the image. However, note that this makes your application strongly dependent on Docker, which might not be ideal. Also note that it essentially gives the container root access to the host system!
(Note that this is different from Docker-in-Docker, which is running a second Docker daemon inside a container and is generally not recommended except for specialized use cases.)
I'm getting in habit with rancher and docker and I'm now trying to figure out if it is possible to create multiple local custom hosts on the same physical machine. I'm running RancherOS in a local computer. Through the Rancher Web UI I'm able to create a local custom host and add containers to it.
When I try to add another local custom host copying the given command to the terminal (SSH into the rancher machine) it stars the process but nothing happen. The new host doesn't appear in the hosts list of the web interface and I don't receive any error from the terminal.
I couldn't get any useful information from the Rancher documentation about this possible issue.
I was wondering if it's not possible to have more than one custom virtual host on the same physical machine or if the command fails for some reason that I would like to know how to debug.
sudo docker run -e -d --privileged \
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock rancher/agent:v0.8.2 \
http://192.168.1.150:8080/v1/projects/1a5/scripts/<registrationToken>
where registrationToken is replaced by the one provided by rancher.
There is nothing "virtual" about them. The agent talks to docker and manages one docker daemon, which is the entire machine. Running multiple does not make sense for a variety of reasons, such as when you type "docker run ..." on the machine, which agent is supposed to pick up that container? And they are not really isolated from each other regardless, because any of them can run privileged containers which can then do whatever they want that affects the others.
The only way to do what you're asking is to have actual virtual machines running on the physical machine, each with their own OS and docker daemon.
Another option might be to use linux containers to create separated environments, each having it's own ip address and running it's own docker daemon.
I created a customize Docker image based on ubuntu 14.04 with the Sensu-Client package inside.
Everything's went fine but now I'm wondering how can I trigger the checks to run from the hosts machine.
For example, I want to be able to check the processes that are running on the host machine and not only the ones running inside the container.
Thanks
It depends on what checks you want to run. A lot of system-level checks work fine if you run sensu container with --net=host and --privileged flags.
--net=host not just allows you to see the same hostname and IP as host system, but also all the tcp connections and interface metric will match for container and host.
--privileged gives container full access to system metrics like hdd, memory, cpu.
Tricky thing is checking external process metrics, as docker isolates it even from privileged container, but you can share host's root filesystem as docker volume ( -v /:/host) and patch check to use chroot or use /host/proc instead of /proc.
Long story short, some checks will just work, for others you need to patch or develop your own way, but sensu in docker is one possible way.
an unprivileged docker container cannot check processes outside of it's container because docker uses kernel namespaces to isolate it from all other processes running on the host. This is by design: docker security documentation
If you would like to run a super privileged docker container that has this namespace disabled you can run:
docker run -it --rm --privileged --pid=host alpine /bin/sh
Doing so removes an important security layer that docker provides and should be avoided if possible. Once in the container, try running ps auxf and you will see all processes on the host.
I don't think this is possible right now.
If the processes in the host instance are running inside docker, you can mount the socket and get the status from the sensu container
Add a sensu-client to the host machine? You might want to split it out so you have granulation between problems in the containers VS problems with your hosts
Else - You would have to set up some way to report from the inside - Either using something low level (system calls etc) or set up something from outside to catch the the calls and report back status.
HTHs
Most if not all sensu plugins hardcode the path to the proc files. One option is to mount the host proc files to a different path inside of the docker container and modify the sensu plugins to support this other location.
This is my base docker container that supports modifying the sensu plugins proc file location.
https://github.com/sstarcher/docker-sensu
I'm running Jenkins inside a Docker container. I wonder if it's ok for the Jenkins container to also be a Docker host? What I'm thinking about is to start a new docker container for each integration test build from inside Jenkins (to start databases, message brokers etc). The containers should thus be shutdown after the integration tests are completed. Is there a reason to avoid running docker containers from inside another docker container in this way?
Running Docker inside Docker (a.k.a. dind), while possible, should be avoided, if at all possible. (Source provided below.) Instead, you want to set up a way for your main container to produce and communicate with sibling containers.
Jérôme Petazzoni — the author of the feature that made it possible for Docker to run inside a Docker container — actually wrote a blog post saying not to do it. The use case he describes matches the OP's exact use case of a CI Docker container that needs to run jobs inside other Docker containers.
Petazzoni lists two reasons why dind is troublesome:
It does not cooperate well with Linux Security Modules (LSM).
It creates a mismatch in file systems that creates problems for the containers created inside parent containers.
From that blog post, he describes the following alternative,
[The] simplest way is to just expose the Docker socket to your CI container, by bind-mounting it with the -v flag.
Simply put, when you start your CI container (Jenkins or other), instead of hacking something together with Docker-in-Docker, start it with:
docker run -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock ...
Now this container will have access to the Docker socket, and will therefore be able to start containers. Except that instead of starting "child" containers, it will start "sibling" containers.
I answered a similar question before on how to run a Docker container inside Docker.
To run docker inside docker is definitely possible. The main thing is that you run the outer container with extra privileges (starting with --privileged=true) and then install docker in that container.
Check this blog post for more info: Docker-in-Docker.
One potential use case for this is described in this entry. The blog describes how to build docker containers within a Jenkins docker container.
However, Docker inside Docker it is not the recommended approach to solve this type of problems. Instead, the recommended approach is to create "sibling" containers as described in this post
So, running Docker inside Docker was by many considered as a good type of solution for this type of problems. Now, the trend is to use "sibling" containers instead. See the answer by #predmijat on this page for more info.
It's OK to run Docker-in-Docker (DinD) and in fact Docker (the company) has an official DinD image for this.
The caveat however is that it requires a privileged container, which depending on your security needs may not be a viable alternative.
The alternative solution of running Docker using sibling containers (aka Docker-out-of-Docker or DooD) does not require a privileged container, but has a few drawbacks that stem from the fact that you are launching the container from within a context that is different from that one in which it's running (i.e., you launch the container from within a container, yet it's running at the host's level, not inside the container).
I wrote a blog describing the pros/cons of DinD vs DooD here.
Having said this, Nestybox (a startup I just founded) is working on a solution that runs true Docker-in-Docker securely (without using privileged containers). You can check it out at www.nestybox.com.
Yes, we can run docker in docker, we'll need to attach the unix socket /var/run/docker.sock on which the docker daemon listens by default as volume to the parent docker using -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock.
Sometimes, permissions issues may arise for docker daemon socket for which you can write sudo chmod 757 /var/run/docker.sock.
And also it would require to run the docker in privileged mode, so the commands would be:
sudo chmod 757 /var/run/docker.sock
docker run --privileged=true -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -it ...
I was trying my best to run containers within containers just like you for the past few days. Wasted many hours. So far most of the people advise me to do stuff like using the docker's DIND image which is not applicable for my case, as I need the main container to be Ubuntu OS, or to run some privilege command and map the daemon socket into container. (Which never ever works for me)
The solution I found was to use Nestybox on my Ubuntu 20.04 system and it works best. Its also extremely simple to execute, provided your local system is ubuntu (which they support best), as the container runtime are specifically deigned for such application. It also has the most flexible options. The free edition of Nestybox is perhaps the best method as of Nov 2022. Highly recommends you to try it without bothering all the tedious setup other people suggest. They have many pre-constructed solutions to address such specific needs with a simple command line.
The Nestybox provide special runtime environment for newly created docker container, they also provides some ubuntu/common OS images with docker and systemd in built.
Their goal is to make the main container function exactly the same as a virtual machine securely. You can literally ssh into your ubuntu main container as well without the ability to access anything in the main machine. From your main container you may create all kinds of containers like a normal local system does. That systemd is very important for you to setup docker conveniently inside the container.
One simple common command to execute sysbox:
dock run --runtime=sysbox-runc -it any_image
If you think thats what you are looking for, you can find out more at their github:
https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox
Quicklink to instruction on how to deploy a simple sysbox runtime environment container: https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox/blob/master/docs/quickstart/README.md