Question: How can I change a Prometheus container's host address from the default 0.0.0.0:9090 to something like 192.168.1.234:9090?
Background: I am trying to get a Prometheus container to install and start in a production environment on a remote server. Since the server uses an IP other than Prometheus's default (0.0.0.0), I need to update the host address that the Prometheus container uses. If I don't, I can't sign-in to the UI and see any of the metrics. The IP of the remote server is provided by the user during the app's installation.
From what I understand from Prometheus's config document and the output of ./prometheus -h, the host address is immutable and therefore needs to be updated using the --web.listen-address= command-line flag. My problem is I don't know how to pass that flag to my Prometheus container; I can't simply run ./prometheus --web.listen-address="<remote-ip>:9090" because that's not a Docker command. And I can't pass it to the docker run ... command because Docker doesn't recognize that flag.
Environment:
Using SaltStack for config management
I cannot use Docker Swarm (i.e. each container must use its own Dockerfile)
You don't need to change the containerized prometheus' listen address. The 0.0.0.0/0 is the anynet inside the container.
By default, it won't even be accessible from your hosts network, let alone any surrounding networks (like the Internet).
You can map it to a port on a hosts interface though. The command for that looks somewhat like this:
docker run --rm -p 8080:9090 prom/prometheus
which would expose the service at 127.0.0.1:8080 on your host
You can do that with a public (e.g. internet-facing) interface as well, although i'd generally advise against exposing containers like this, due to numerous operational implications, which are somewhat beyond the scope of this answer. You should at least consider a reverse-proxy setup, where the users are only allowed to talk to some heavy-duty webserver which then communicates with prometheus, instead of letting them access your backend directly, even if this is just a small development deployment.
For general considerations on productionizing container setups, i suggest this.
Despite it's clickbaity title, this is a useful read.
Related
I have a server application (that I cannot change) that, when you connect as a client, will give you other URLs to interact with. Those URLs are also part of the same server so the URL advertised uses the hostname of a docker container.
We are running in a mixed economy (some docker containers, some regular applications). We actually need to set up where we have the server running as a docker application on a single VM, and that server will be accessed by non-docker clients (as well as docker clients not running on the same docker network).
So you have a server hostname (the docker container) and a docker hostname (the hostname of the VM running docker).
The client's initial connection is to: dockerhostname:1234 but when the server sends URLs to the client, it sends: serverhostname:5678 ... which is not resolvable by the client. So far, we've addressed this by adding "server hostname " to the client's /etc/hosts file but this is a pain to maintain.
I have also set the --hostname of the server docker container to the same name as the docker host and it has mostly worked but I've seen where a docker container running on the same docker network as the server had issues connecting to the server.
I realize this is not an ideal docker setup. We're migrating from a history of delivering as rpm's to delivering containers .. but it's a slow process. Our company has lots of applications.
I'm really curious if anyone has advice/lessons learned with this situation. What is the best solution to my URL problem? (I'm guessing it is the /etc/hosts we're already doing)
You can do port-mapping -p 8080:80
How you build and run your container?
With a shell command, dockerfile or yml file?
Check this:
docker port
Call this and it will work:
[SERVERIP][PORT FROM DOCKERHOST]
To work with hostnames you need DNS or use hosts file.
The hosts file solution is not a good idea, it's how the internet starts in the past ^^
If something change you have to change all hosts files on every client!
Or use a static ip for your container:
docker network ls
docker network create my-network
docker network create --subnet=172.18.0.0/16 mynet123
docker run --net mynet123 --ip 172.18.0.22 -it ubuntu bash
Assign static IP to Docker container
You're describing a situation that requires a ton of work. The shortest path to success is your "adding things to /etc/hosts file" process. You can use configuration management, like ansible/chef/puppet to only have to update one location and distribute it out.
But at that point, you should look into something called "service discovery." There are a ton of ways to skin this cat, but the short of it is this. You need some place (lazy mode is DNS) that stores a database of your different machines/services. When a machine needs to connect to another machine for a service, it asks that database. Hence the "service discovery" part.
Now implementing the database is the hardest part of this, there are a bunch of different ways, and you'll need to spend some time with your team to figure out what is the best way.
Normally running an internal DNS server like dnsmasq or bind should get you most of the way, but if you need something like consul that's a whole other conversation. There are a lot of options, and the best thing to do is research, and audit what you actually need for your situation.
I am using Docker Compose to deploy my applications. In my docker-compose.yml I have a container my-frontend which must know the public IP of the backend my-backend. The image my-frontend is NodeJS application which runs in the client's browser.
Before I did this:
my-backend:
image: my-backend:latest
ports:
- 81:80
my-frontend:
image: my-frontend:latest
ports:
- 80:80
environment:
- BACKEND=http://localhost:81
This works fine when I deploy to a local Docker daemon and when the client runs locally.
I am now migrating to a remote Docker daemon. In this situation, the client does not run on the same host as the Docker daemon any more. Hence, I need to alter the environment variable BACKEND in my-frontend:
environment:
- BACKEND=http://<ip-of-daemon>:81
When I hardcode <ip-of-daemon> to the actual ip of the Docker daemon, everything is working fine. But I am wondering if there is a way to dynamically fill this in? So I can use the same docker-compose.yml for any remote Docker daemon.
With Docker Compose, your Docker containers will all appear on the same machine. Perhaps you are using tools like Swarm or Kubernetes in order to distribute your containers on different hosts, which would mean that your backend and frontend containers would indeed be accessible via different public IP addresses.
The usual way of dealing with this is to use a frontend proxy like Traefik on a single entry point. This means that from the browser's perspective, the IP address for your frontend and backend is the same. Internally, the proxy will use filtering rules to direct traffic to the correct LAN name. The usual approach is to use a URL path prefix like /backend/.
You correctly mentioned in the comments that, assuming your frontend container is accessible on a static public IP, you could just internally proxy from there to your backend, using NginX. That should work just fine.
Either of these approaches will allow a single IP to appear to "share" ports - this resolves the problem of wanting to listen on the same IP on 80/443 in more than one container. You need to try to avoid non-standard ports for backend calls, since some networks can block them (e.g. mobile networks, corporate firewalled environments).
I am not sure what an alternative would be to those approaches. You can certainly obtain a machine's public IP if you can run code on the host, but if your container orchestration is sending containers to machines, the only code that will run is inside each container, and I don't believe public IP information is exposed there.
Update based on your use-case
I had initially assumed from your question that you were expecting your containers to spin up on arbitrary hosts in a Docker farm. In fact, your current approach confirmed in the comments is a number of non-connected Docker hosts, so whenever you deploy, your containers are guaranteed to share a public IP. I understand the purpose behind your question a bit better now - you were wanting to specify a base URL for your backend, including a fully-qualified domain, non-standard port, and URL path prefix.
As I indicated in the discussion, this is probably not necessary, since you are able to put a proxy URL path prefix (/backend) in your frontend NginX. This negates the need for a non-standard port.
If you wanted to specify a custom backend prefix (e.g. /backend/v1 to version your API) then you could do that in env vars in your Docker Compose config.
If you need to refer to the backend's fully-qualified address in your JavaScript for the purposes of connecting to AJAX/WebSocket servers, you can just derive this from window.location.host. In your dev env this will be a bare IP address, and in your remote envs, it sounds like you have a domain.
Addendum
Some of the confusion on this question was about what sort of IP addresses we are referring to. For example:
I believe that the public IP of my-backend is equal to the docker daemon's IP
Well, your Docker host has several IP addresses, and the public address is just one of them. For example, the virtual network interface docker0 is the LAN IP of your Docker host, and if you ask for the IP of your Docker host, that would indeed be a correct answer (though of course it is not accessible on the public internet).
In fact, I would say the LAN address belongs to the daemon (since Docker sets it up) and the public IP does not (it is a feature of the box, not Docker).
In any of your Docker hosts, try this command:
ifconfig docker0
That will give you some information about your host's IP, and is useful if a Docker container wishes to contact the host (e.g. if you want to connect to a service that is not running in a container). It is quite useful to pass the IP herein into a container as an env var, in order to allow this connection to take place.
my-backend:
image: my-backend:latest
ports:
- 81:80
my-frontend:
image: my-frontend:latest
ports:
- 80:80
environment:
- BACKEND="${BACKEND_ENV}"
Where BACKEND_ENV is and enviroment variable setted to the the docker daemon's ip.
In the machine where is docker-compose executed set the environment variable before.
export BACKEND_ENV="http://remoteip..."
Or just start the frontend pointing to the remote address
docker run -p 80:80 -e BACKEND='http://remote_backend_ip:81' my-frontend:latest
I'm trying to make a docker machine available to my Windows by a host name. After creating it like
docker-machine create -d virtualbox mymachine
and setting up a docker container that exposes the port 80, how can I give that docker machine a host name such that I can enter "http://mymachine/" into my browser to load the website? When I change "mymachine" to the actual IP address then it works.
There is an answer to this question but I would like to achieve it without an entry in the hosts file. Is that possible?
You might want to refer to docker documentaion:
https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/networking/#exposing-and-publishing-ports
You expose ports using the EXPOSE keyword in the Dockerfile or the
--expose flag to docker run. Exposing ports is a way of documenting which ports are used, but does not actually map or open any ports.
Exposing ports is optional.
You publish ports using the --publish or --publish-all flag to docker
run. This tells Docker which ports to open on the container’s network
interface. When a port is published, it is mapped to an available
high-order port (higher than 30000) on the host machine, unless you
specify the port to map to on the host machine at runtime. You cannot
specify the port to map to on the host machine when you build the
image (in the Dockerfile), because there is no way to guarantee that
the port will be available on the host machine where you run the
image.
I also suggest reviewing the -P flag as it differs from the -p one.
Also i suggest you try "Kitematic" for Windows or Mac, https://kitematic.com/ . It's much simpler (but dont forget to commit after any changes!)
Now concerning the network in your company, it has nothing to do with docker, as long as you're using docker locally on your computer it wont matter what configuration your company set. Even you dont have to change any VM network config in order to expose things to your local host, all comes by default if you're using Vbox ( adapter 1 ==> NAT & adapter 2 ==> host only )
hope this is what you're looking for
If the goal is to keep it as simple as possible for multiple developers, localhost will be your best bet. As long as the ports you're exposing and publishing are available on host, you can just use http://localhost in the browser. If it's a port other than 80/443, just append it like http://localhost:8080.
If you really don't want to go the /etc/hosts or localhost route, you could also purchase a domain and have it route to 127.0.0.1. This article lays out the details a little bit more.
Example:
dave-mbp:~ dave$ traceroute yoogle.com
traceroute to yoogle.com (127.0.0.1), 64 hops max, 52 byte packets
1 localhost (127.0.0.1) 0.742 ms 0.056 ms 0.046 ms
Alternatively, if you don't want to purchase your own domain and all developers are on the same network and you are able to control DHCP/DNS, you can setup your own DNS server to include a private route back to 127.0.0.1. Similar concept to the Public DNS option, but a little more brittle since you might allow your devs to work remote, outside of a controlled network.
Connecting by hostname requires that you go through hostname to IP resolution. That's handled by the hosts file and falls back to DNS. This all happens before you ever touch the docker container, and docker machine itself does not have any external hooks to go out and configure your hosts file or DNS servers.
With newer versions of Docker on windows, you run containers with HyperV and networking automatically maps ports to localhost so you can connect to http://localhost. This won't work with docker-machine since it's spinning up virtualbox VM's without the localhost mapping.
If you don't want to configure your hosts file, DNS, and can't use a newer version of docker, you're left with connecting by IP. What you can do is use a free wildcard DNS service like http://xip.io/ that maps any name you want, along with your IP address, back to that same IP address. This lets you use things like a hostname based reverse proxy to connect to multiple containers inside of docker behind the same port.
One last option is to run your docker host VM with a static IP. Docker-machine doesn't support this directly yet, so you can either rely on luck to keep the same IP from a given range, or use another tool like Vagrant to spin up the docker host VM with a static IP on the laptop. Once you have a static IP, you can modify the host file once, create a DNS entry for every dev, or use the same xip.io URL, to access the containers each time.
If you're on a machine with Multicasting DNS (that's Bonjour on a Mac), then the approach that's worked for me is to fire up an Avahi container in the Docker Machine vbox. This lets me refer to VM services at <docker-machine-vm-name>.local. No editing /etc/hosts, no crazy networking settings.
I use different Virtualbox VMs for different projects for my work, which keeps a nice separation of concerns (prevents port collisions, lets me blow away all the containers and images without affecting my other projects, etc.)
Using docker-compose, I just put an Avahi instance at the top of each project:
version: '2'
services:
avahi:
image: 'enernoclabs/avahi:latest'
network_mode: 'host'
Then if I run a webserver in the VM with a docker container forwarding to port 80, it's just http://machine-name.local in the browser.
You can add a domain name entry in your hosts file :
X.X.X.X mymachine # Replace X.X.X.X by the IP of your docker machine
You could also set up a DNS server on your local network if your app is meant to be reachable from your coworkers at your workplace and if your windows machine is meant to remain up as a server.
that would require to make your VM accessible from local network though, but port forwarding could then be a simple solution if your app is the only webservice running on your windows host. (Note that you could as well set up a linux server to avoid using docker-machine on windows, but you would still have to set up a static IP for this server to ensure that your domain name resolution works).
You could also buy your own domain name (or get a free one) and assign it your docker-machine's IP if you don't have rights to write in your hosts file.
But these solution may not work anymore after some time if app host doesn't have a static IP and if your docker-machine IP changes). Not setting up a static IP doesn't imply it will automatically change though, there should be some persistence if you don't erase the machine to create a new one, but that wouldn't be guaranteed either.
Also note that if you set up a DNS server, you'd have to host it on a device with a static IP as well. Your coworkers would then have to configure their machine to use this one.
I suggest nginx-proxy. This is what I use all the time. It comes in especially handy when you are running different containers that are all supposed to answer to the same port (e.g. multiple web-services).
nginx-proxy runs seperately from your service and listens to docker-events to update it's own configuration. After you spun up your service and query the port nginx-proxy is listening to, you will be redirected to your service. Therefore you either need to start nginx-proxy with the DEFAULT_HOST flag or send the desired host as header param with the request.
As I am running this only with plain docker, I don't know if it works with docker-machine, though.
If you go for this option, you can decide for a certain domain (e.g. .docker) to be completely resolved to localhost. This can be either done company-wide by DNS, locally with hosts file or an intermediate resolver (the specific solution depends on your OS, of course). If you then try to reach http://service1.docker nginx-proxy will route to the container that has then ENV VIRTUAL_HOST=service1.docker. This is really convenient, because it only needs one-time setup and is from then on dynamic.
An application server is running as one Docker container and database running in another container. IP address of the database server is obtained as:
sudo docker inspect -f '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}' db
Setting up JDBC resource in the application server to point to the database gives "java.net.ConnectException".
Linking containers is not an option since that only works on the same host.
How do I ensure that IP address of the database container is visible to the application server container?
If you want private networking between docker containers on remote hosts you can use weave to setup an overlay network between docker containers. If you don't need a private network just expose the ports using the -p switch and configure the addresses of the host machine as the destination IP in the required docker container.
One simple way to solve this would be using Weave. It allows you to create many application-specific networks that can span multiple hosts as well as datacenters. It also has a very neat DNS-based service discovery mechanism.
I should disclaim, I am one of Weave engineering team.
Linking containers is not an option since that only works on the same host.
So are you saying your application is a container running on docker server 1 and your db is a container on docker server 2? If so, you treat it like ordinary remote hosts. Your DB port needs to be exposed on docker server 2 and that IP:port needs to be configured into your application server, typically via environment variables.
The per host docker subnetwork is a Private Network. It's perhaps possible to have this address be routable, but it would be much pain. And it's further complicated because container IP's are not static.
What you need to do is publish the ports/services up to the host (via PORT in dockerfile and -p in your docker run) Then you just do host->host. You can resolve hosts by IP, Environment Variables, or good old DNS.
Few things were missing that were not allowing the cross-container communication:
WildFly was not bound to 0.0.0.0 and thus was only accepting requests on eht0. This was fixed using "-b 0.0.0.0".
Firewall was not allowing the containers to communication. This was removed using "systemctl stop firewall; systemctl disable firewall"
Virtual Box image required a Host-only adapter
After this, the containers are able to communicate. Complete details are available at:
http://blog.arungupta.me/2014/12/wildfly-javaee7-mysql-link-two-docker-container-techtip65/
It seems that the preferred way to expose services to other Docker containers is container linking, which sets some environment variables that you then have to use in your application code to look up host names and port numbers:
psql -h $PG_PORT_5432_TCP_ADDR -p $PG_PORT_5432_TCP_PORT
Is there a reason this is not done via port forwarding in a way that is transparent to the application? So that in the same way that I can just run my web server inside the container on standard port 80 and have Docker figure out what actual port to use, I could just be doing
psql -h 0.0.0.0 # no -p necessary, we use the default port
The port forwarding would be set up when I start docker, just like with server ports.
This is possible! It has actually be proposed by the CoreOS team; you can read more in the following blog post:
http://coreos.com/blog/Jumpers-and-the-software-defined-localhost/
Docker will soon allow to start a container sharing the network namespace of another container; it will help with those scenarios (and in the short term, it will allow to do what you suggest very easily).
Project Atomic is also following this approach:
http://www.projectatomic.io/docs/inter-container-networking/
Geard uses iptables to enable containers to connect to each other. Network namespaces allows adding iptables rules to the network namespace of a container. The basic idea is to make remote endpoints appear as if they were local to a container. For example the database container could be made to appear to be running locally inside the application container.