how does docker auto allocate and recycle ports for containers - docker

When I run docker command
docker run -d -P nginx
docker will run and auto allocate port for nginx's port 80. If I stop the image and start it again, a new port will be allocated to nginx (normally next one available).
As I found out, the range for port allocation is based on ephemeral port range , in docker case default is 32768 - 61000. (https://docs.docker.com/v17.09/engine/userguide/networking/default_network/binding/)
How and when does docker recycle ports? Will it go back to 32768 or nearest available?

It took a lot of time for me to find out but docker doesn't do much.
I dived into docker-ce source files and saw that it uses a function RequestPortInRange which simply gives the next available port.
Now, when you run docker run -d -P nginx command, docker gives you the first available port in the "ephemeral range" i.e. 32768 - 61000 ( as you pointed out).
Once you destroy /stop the container, it should resume to 32768, However, it goes to the next available port i.e. 32769 ( on my computer at least).
So, I thought may be it takes sometime for linux or any OS to take back the port after the container is destroyed but netstat -lntu confirms that the port isn't in use any more.
So, my theory is (which may be entirely wrong, in which case I will be glad to be corrected ), that it creates one instance of PortAllocator thing and thus it has a state. so, the next time docker run -P ... is called, it goes for the next available port. This is also corroborated by the fact that even when you create other containers, the docker engine is providing you the next available port not the previous yet available ones.
I hope i answered your question and i don't know much of golang so, forgive any mistake in terminology.

Related

DDev Ports are not available

I have a DDev project in WSL2. Whenever I try to start it I get an error:
Error response from daemon: Ports are not available: exposing port TCP 127.0.0.1:443 -> 0.0.0.0:0: listen tcp 127.0.0.1:443: bind: Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.'
Sometimes it's also port 80. But most importantly before starting the project none of those ports is occupied. Neither inside WSL nor on the Windows Host. I am also able to start another docker container exposing on those ports. I am even to manually start the router with
COMPOSE_PROJECT_NAME=ddev-project docker-compose -f /home/crs/.ddev/.router-compose-full.yaml -p ddev-router up -d
but I still can't access the project even though the router seems to be running.
ddev debug test also fails.
I tried updating and reinstalling both Docker Desktop and ddev.
I also tried changing the router_http_port and router_https_port to something else. Then it does seem to start the project but I still can't access anything through the ddev router.
The web containers seem to work fine, when not going through the router I can access the project.
Debugging for this is explained in the docs, but it's slightly trickier on WSL2, because the process that's giving trouble may be either on the Windows side or the WSL2 side.
As explained there, you can either find the competing process or change to use different ports in DDEV.
On WSL2, port 80 is often apache2, which some distros have by default, so you can stop it or uninstall it without any harm. Port 443 is something occupied by random poorly behaved processes on Windows, including sometimes virus checkers.
If you use the techniques there to check for competing ports you'll almost certainly solve this.
Another technique is to use curl localhost, curl -I localhost or curl https://localhost and curl -I https://localhost to see if the HTTP response gives you a clue what process is problematic.
Also note that sometimes Docker Desktop is poorly behaved if you're using it, and you may have to restart it.
But if changing the ports to, say, 8080 and 8443 didn't solve it for you then you have a connectivity problem, likely a firewall. That's a completely different problem and you'll want to walk through the troubleshooting instructions in docs and start with temporarily turning off firewall and VPN.
For more interactive help, join us in the DDEV Discord.

Worldserver changing ports after docker-compose down & docker-compose up

I'm using AzerothCore with Docker.
I've noticed that after running docker-compose down and docker-compose up my worldserver and the database now uses different ports than the defaults. How to prevent this?
Note: the authserver port remained the same.
I use Windows 10 20H2 (Build 19042.844)
Normally docker creates automatically a tunnel on a random free port for any service that tries to bound on its own network.
However, unless you changed the WORLD_EXTERNAL_PORT or the port is already busy for some reason, the original port (together with the random one) should be open as well.
you can run the docker-compose ps or the docker ps to check which are network ports open.
Also, this behaviour changes based on your OS. Can you specify it in your first post, please?
thanks for the prompt reply, I haven't changed anything about WORLD_EXTERNAL_PORT, as for 'docker-compose ps' again my overwhelming inexperience comes out hehe, dont know where to enter the command, the 'docker ps' gives this result:

Docker Swarm - Unable to connect to other containers because IP lookup fails

Say we provision an overlay network using docker swarm and create various containers with following names:
Alice
Bob
Larry
John
now if we try to ping any container from another it fails because it does not know how to do the IP lookup i.e., alice does not know bob's IP and so on. We have been taking care of this by manually editing the /etc/hosts on every container and entering the name/IP key value pair in that file but this is becoming very tedious with every restart of our network. There ought to be a better way of handling this.
E.g., services created using docker stack do not suffer from this problem. Due to various reasons we are stuck with creating containers using the vanilla docker create. How can we make containers discover each other on the overlay network without manual labor of editing /etc/hosts?
Below is detailed workflow we currently have to follow:
we first provision a docker swarm and overlay network
Then for each container, we create it using the docker create command and then start it using docker start command. we use the --network flag to attach the container to the overlay network at time of creation
We then use docker container inspect to get the IP address of each container. This involves running n commands and noting down IP address.
Then we log into each container and edit the /etc/hosts file by hand and enter the (name, IP) key-value pair of the other containers. So this means having to enter n*(n-1) records by hand when summed across containers.
Not sure why docker create does not do all this automatically - docker already knows (or can know) all the IP addresses. Containers provisioned using docker stack e.g., do not have to go through this manual process to "discover" each other. The reason why we cannot use docker stack is because:
it does not allow us to specify container name
we run various commands (mostly docker cp) before starting the container and not possible to do this using stack
You might have seen this already: DNS on User defines networks
Have you created your services like in the section „Attach a service to an overlay“ in this doc?
It seems that the only thing that is needed is to refer the containers by their {name}.{network} instead of just the {name}. No need to edit /etc/hosts or use the --add-host flag or run some additional dns server. Refer https://forums.docker.com/t/need-help-connecting-containers-in-swarm-mode/77944/6
Further details: the official documentation for docker does not mention anywhere the necessity to add .{network} suffix to the {containername}. Indeed on this link, Step #7 under the Walk-through, there is no .{network} suffix used. So not sure why we need to do that. The version of docker we are using is 18.06.1-ce for linux.
I had a similar issue : I'm following this official tutorial to create a docker swarm overlay network on two Raspberry pi 3 and the ping was impossible unless I found on Github the answer : as I understood, it seems that latest version of alpine (for a reason that I ignore) is not suitable for Raspberry pi 3 so the solution would be the use of the version 3.12.3 like this : sudo docker run -dit --name alpine1 --network test1 alpine:3.12.3
Hope that this might help someone :)

How to obtain the published ports from within a docker container?

I wrote a simple peer to peer system, in which, when starting a node
the node looks for a free port and then makes its service accessible on that port,
it registers its URL including the port to a central server, so that other nodes know how to connect to it.
I have the impression this is a typical kind of task that docker is useful for, so I thought of making a container for these peers (my previous experience with docker has only been to write a hello world container).
Ideally I would map (publish) my exposed port to a host port from within the container using the same code that I am running now, but I could imagine that is simply not possible, and I could get around that by starting the image using a script that checks for availability of ports and then runs the container on an appropriate free host port. If the first is possible however, that would be even better. To be explicit, I do something like the following in Python
port = 5001
while not port_is_free(port):
port += 1
The second part really has to be taken care of from within the container. Assume that it has been started with the command docker run -p 5005:80 p2p-node then I need to find out the published port 5005 that the exposed port 80 is mapped to from within the container.
Searching this site and the internet it looks like more people are interested in doing the same, but I couldn't find a solution, nor an affirmation that this simply cannot be done.
So this is the main question I want to ask: how can I see which published ports my exposed ports are mapped to from within a running docker container?
Some of your requirements are not clear to me.
However if you want to know only which host port is mapped with your container's port, you can simply pass an environment variable, -e VAR=val. Just an idea
Start container:
docker run -p 5005:80 -e HOST_PORT=5005 p2p-node
Access the variable from container
echo $HOST_PORT
there is docker-py, a python library of docker.
It is not clear why you want the host port. In docker, containers can communicate with each other without having to expose ports on host machines.
As long as the peer apps are containerized, you don't need the expose port. The containers can be connected via a Docker network and the internal port can be used for communication between the containers.

localhost not working docker windows 10

I am using VS2017 docker support. VS created DockerFile for me and when I build docker-compose file, it creates the container and runs the app on 172.x.x.x IP address. But I want to run my application on localhost.
I did many things but nothing worked. Followed the docker docs as a starter and building microsoft sample app . The second link is working perfectly but I get HTTP Error 404 when tried the first link approach.
Any help is appreciated.
Most likely a different application already runs at port 80. You'll have to forward your web site to a different port, eg:
docker run -d -p 5000:80 --name myapp myasp
And point your browser to http://localhost:5000.
When you start a container you specify which inner ports will be exposed as ports on the host through the -p option. -p 80:80 exposes the inner port 80 used by web sites to the host's port 80.
Docker won't complain though if another application already listens at port 80, like IIS, another web application or any tool with a web interface that runs on 80 by default.
The solution is to:
Make sure nothing else runs on port 80 or
Forward to a different port.
Forwarding to a different port is a lot easier.
To ensure that you can connect to a port, use the telnet command, eg :
telnet localhost 5000
If you get a blank window immediatelly, it means a server is up and running on this port. If you get a message and timeout after a while, it means nobody is running. You anc use this both to check for free ports and ensure you can connect to your container web app.
PS I run into this just a week ago, as I was trying to set up a SQL Server container for tests. I run 1 default and 2 named instances already, and docker didn't complain at all when I tried to create the container. Took me a while to realize what was wrong.
In order to access the example posted on Docker Docs, that you pointed out as not working, follow the below steps,
1 - List all the running docker containers
docker ps -a
After you run this command you should be able to view all your docker containers that are currently running and you should see a container with the name webserver listed there, if you have followed the docker docs example correctly.
2 - Get the IP address where your webserver container is running. To do that run the following command.
docker inspect -f "{{ .NetworkSettings.Networks.nat.IPAddress }}" webserver
You should now get the IP address which the webserver container is running, hope you are familiar with this step as it was even available within the building Microsoft sample app example that you attached with the question.
Access the IP address you get once running the above command and you should see the desired output.
Answering to your first question (accessing docker container with localhost in docker for windows), in Windows host you cannot access the container with localhost due to a limitation in the default NAT network stack. A more detailed explanation for this issue can be obtained by visiting this link. Seems like the docker documentation is not yet updated but this issue only exists in Windows hosts.
There is an issue reported for this as well - Follow this link to see that.
Hope this helps you out.
EDIT
The solution for this issue seems to be coming in a future Windows release. Yet that release comes out this limitation is available in Windows host. Follow this link -> https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/Virtualization-Documentation/issues/181
For those who encountering this issue in 2022, changing localhost to 127.0.0.1 solved an issue for me.
There is other problem too
You must have correct order with parameters
This is WRONG
docker run container:latest -p 5001:80
This sequence start container but parameter -p is ignore, therefore container have no ports mapping
This is good
docker run -p 5001:80 container:latest

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