Map container to hostname other than localhost in Docker for Mac - docker

I am creating an Nginx container that I would like to access locally at http://api. Using Docker Machine, I assumed running docker-machine create default and docker-machine ip default to receive the IP and editing my hosts file to something like this:
# docker-machine ip default --> 192.168.99.100
192.168.99.100 api
should map requests to api\ to the Docker Machine IP and serve my content.
Two things are confusing me:
I launch Docker through the Mac App and can create Nginx containers and access content at http://localhost. However, running docker-machine ls returns no machines. This is confusing because I thought Docker had to run on a VM.
Starting from scratch and starting Docker Machine, then spinning up containers seems to have no effect. In other words, I still can access content at http://localhost but not http://api
Instead of accessing my container at http://localhost I want to access it at http://api. How do I do this?
I'm using Docker for Mac 17.12 and Docker Machine 0.14.

On the base of your this question:
Instead of accessing my container at http://localhost I want to access
it at http://api. How do I do this?
Your docker run command:
docker run -it --rm --name test --add-host api:192.168.43.8 -p 80:80 apachehttpd
1st Thing: The --add-host flag add value to /etc/hosts in your container /etc/hosts so http://api will also response inside the container if ping inside that container.
This is how will ping response inside container
2nd Thing: Edit your host etc/hosts file and add
api 192.168.43.8 [your ip]
This is how you can see in Browser.

Related

Using a Docker web container, how do I access localhost from a custom url, even though the ip keeps changing?

Using Ubuntu 20.04.
I have a Docker web container that I can access locally at localhost:8000 I want to instead access this by typing hello.localhost in my browser.
I can accomplish this by adding the containers ip address to my /etc/hosts file but the problem is that this ip address can change. How can I resolve this?
Generally, you would solve this using port publishing. Let's say you have multiple containers; we'll call them hello and goodbye. You'd like to access them as http://hello.localhost and http://goodbye.localhost, without having to append a port number.
You can bind each container to a specific ip on your host, like this:
docker run --name hello -p 127.0.0.2:80:8000 myimage
docker run --name goodbye -p 127.0.0.3:80:8000 myimage
Here, we've bound port 8000 on container hello to 127.0.0.2:80, and port 8000 on container goodbye to 127.0.0.3:80. All that we need to do now is tell our host about names for these addresses, which we can do by adding something like this to /etc/hosts:
127.0.0.2 hello.localhost
127.0.0.3 goodbye.localhost
Now you can browse to http://hello.localhost or http://goodbye.localhost (as long as your browser is running on the same machine as your docker containers).

How to access a port that is already used by another Docker container

I am running a Tomcat server on one Docker container. On another docker container, i want to be able to access that Tomcat server. So, what I do is to use the -p option to map that port to the port mapped by the Docker container running the Tomcat server.
In short, I have the Tomcat container, which was run using something like this.
docker run ... -p X:8080 ...
And the other docker container like this
docker run ... -p X:X ...
However, if I try to do so, I get "Port is already allocated" error. How can I solve this problem?
When you add -p X:Y you are mapping Y port from container to X port in host machine and making it accessable in host.
Lets assume your tomcat container is running on 8080:8080
Now you have another container running
You can access tomcat container inside 2nd container by internal IP.
If both containers are on default network.
Something like this 172.0.0.2:8080
You can get assigned internal IP for container by this
docker network inspect bridge
or
docker container inspect $id
where id is container id

Why can't I curl one docker container from another via the host

I really don't understand what's going on here. I just simply want to perform a http request from inside one docker container, to another docker container, via the host, using the host's public ip, on a published port.
Here is my setup. I have my dev machine. And I have a docker host machine with two containers. CONT_A listens and publishes a web service on port 3000.
DEV-MACHINE
HOST (Public IP = 111.222.333.444)
CONT_A (Publish 3000)
CONT_B
On my dev machine (a completely different machine)
I can curl without any problems
curl http://111.222.333.444:3000 --> OK
When I SSH into the HOST
I can curl without any problesm
curl http://111.222.333.444:3000 --> OK
When I execute inside CONT_B
Not possible, just timeout. Ping is fine though...
docker exec -it CONT_B bash
$ curl http://111.222.333.444:3000 --> TIMEOUT
$ ping 111.222.333.444 --> OK
Why?
Ubuntu 16.04, Docker 1.12.3 (default network setup)
I know this isn't strictly answer to the question but there's a more Docker-ish way of solving your problem. I would forget about publishing the port for inter-container communication altogether. Instead create an overlay network using docker swarm. You can find the full guide here but in essence you do the following:
//create network
docker network create --driver overlay --subnet=10.0.9.0/24 my-net
//Start Container A
docker run -d --name=A --network=my-net producer:latest
//Start Container B
docker run -d --name=B --network=my-net consumer:latest
//Magic has occured
docker exec -it B /bin/bash
> curl A:3000 //MIND BLOWN!
Then inside container be you can just curl hostname A and it will resolve for you (even when you start doing scaling etc.)
If you're not keen on using Docker swarm you can still use Docker legacy links as well:
docker run -d --name B --link A:A consumer:latest
which would link any exposed (not published) ports in your A container.
And finally, if you start moving to production...forget about links & overlay networks altogether...use Kubernetes :-) Bit more difficult initial setup but they introduce a bunch of concepts & tools to make linking & scaling clusters of containers a lot easier! But that's just my personal opinion.
By running your container B with --network host argument, You can simply access your container A using localhost, no public ip needed.
> docker run -d --name containerB --network host yourimagename:version
After you run container B with above command then you can try curl container A from container B like this
> docker exec -it containerB /bin/bash
> curl http://localhost:3000
None of the current answers explain why the docker containers behave like described in the question
Docker is there to provide a lightweight isolation of the host resources to one or several containers.
The Docker network is by default isolated from the host network, and use a bridge network (again, by default; you have have overlay network) for inter-container communication.
and how to fix the problem without docker networks.
From "How to connect to the Docker host from inside a Docker container?"
As of Docker version 18.03, you can use the host.docker.internal hostname to connect to your Docker host from inside a Docker container.
This works fine on Docker for Mac and Docker for Windows, but unfortunately, this is not was not supported on Linux until Docker 20.10.0was released in December 2020.
Starting from version 20.10 , the Docker Engine now also supports communicating with the Docker host via host.docker.internal on Linux.
Unfortunately, this won't work out of the box on Linux because you need to add the extra --add-host run flag:
--add-host=host.docker.internal:host-gateway
This is for development purpose and will not work in a production environment outside of Docker Desktop for Windows/Mac.
That way, you don't have to change your network driver to --network=host, and you still can access the host through host.docker.internal.
I had a similar problem, I have a nginx server in one container (lets call it web) with several server blocks, and cron installed in another container (lets call it cron). I use docker compose. I wanted to use curl from cron to web from time to time to execute some php script on one of the application. It should look as follows:
curl http://app1.example.com/some_maintance.php
But I always was getting host unreachable after some time.
First solution was to update /etc/hosts in cron container, and add:
1.2.3.4 app1.example.com
where 1.2.3.4 is the ip for web container, and it worked - but this is a hack - also as far as I know such manual updates are not encouraged. You should use extra_hosts in docker compose, which requires explicit ip address instead of name of container to specify IP address.
I tried to use custom networks solution, which as I have seen is the correct way to deal with this, but I never succeeded here. If I ever learn how to do this I promise to update this answer.
Finally I used curl capability to specify IP address of the server, and I pass domain name as a header in separate parameter:
curl -H'Host: app1.example.com' web/some_maintance.php
not very beautiful but does work.
(here web is the name of my nginx container)

How to access docker container via its Ip from the host

I want to be able to access a docker container via its Ip eg the one I can see when I do docker container inspect foo
The reason is I am using zookeeper inside a docker container that is managing two other docker containers running solr. My code (not in docker and I don't at this stage want it to be) calls zookeeper to get the urls of the solr servers which zookeeper reports as the docker containers ip. My code then falls over because calling the docker containers ip from the host fails as it should be calling localhost.
So how can I allow a call to the docker containers ip from the host to be routed correctly. (I am using Docker native for Mac)
I'm not using Docker for Mac, so I'm not sure the newest version Docker for Mac is still based on Docker-machine (which based on VirtualBox) or not.
If you can confirm your Docker for Mac is based on VirtualBox, then you probably could get the inet IP of vboxnet0 network interface via ifconfig command. This IP should be used as your calling IP.
Besides, you should know the port number of your Zookeeper container. Normally the exposed port of a container could be configured in docker run command, for example:
docker run -p 5000:5001 -i -t ubuntu /bin/bash
Where -p indicated the exposed port of the container.

Obtaining the ip address of a docker container

I have a ubuntu machine which is a VM where I have installed docker in it. I am using this machine from my local windows machine and doing ssh , opening the terminal to the ubuntu machine.
Now , I am going to take a docker image which contains all the necessary softwares for eg: apache installed in it. Later I am going to deploy a sample appication(which is a web applicationP on to it and save it .
Now , I am in a confused mode as in how to check the deployed application if its running properly. i.e., what would be the address of the container which containds the deployed application.
for eg:- If I type http://127.x.x.x which is the address of the ubuntu machine , I am just getting time out .
Can anyone tell me how to verify the deployed application . Also, the printing the output of the program on the console works seemlessly fine , as the output gets printed , only thing I have some doubts is regarding the web application.
There are some possibilities to check whether your app is running.
Remote API
As JimiDini said, one possibility is the Docker remote API. You can use it to see all running containers (which would be your use case, right?), inspect a certain container or start and stop containers. The API is a REST-API with several binding for programming languages (at https://docs.docker.io/reference/api/remote_api_client_libraries/). Some of them are very outdated. To use the Docker remote API from another machine, I needed to open it explicitly:
docker -H tcp://0.0.0.0:4243 -H unix:///var/run/docker.sock -d &
Note that the API is open to the world now! In a real scenario you would need to secure it in some way (e.g. see the example at http://java.dzone.com/articles/securing-docker%E2%80%99s-remote-api).
Docker PS
To see all running containers run docker ps on your host. This will list all running containers. If you do not see your app, it is not running. It also shows you the ports your app is exposing. You can also do this via the remote API.
Logs
You can also check the logs. You can run docker attach <container id> to attach to a certain container an see its stdout. You can run also run docker logs <container id> to receive the Docker logs. What I prefer is to write the logs to a certain directory, e.g. all logs to /var/log and mount this folder to my host machine. Then all your logs will end up in /home/ubuntu/docker-logs on your host.
docker run -p 80:8080 -v /home/ubuntu/docker-logs:/var/log:rw my/application
One word to ports and IP
Every container will get its own IP address. You can check this IP address via the remote API or via Docker on the host machine directly. You can also specify a certain host name for the container (by passing the --hostname="test42" to the run command). However, you mostly did not need that.
To access the application in the container, you need to open the port in the container and bind to a port on the host.
In your Dockerfile you need to EXPOSE the port your app runs on:
FROM ubuntu
...
EXPOSE 8080
CMD run-my-app.sh
When you start your container, you need to bind this port to a port of the host:
docker run -p 80:8080 my/application
Now you can access your app on http://localhost:80 or http://127.0.0.1:80.
If you app does not response, check if the container is running by typing docker ps or the remote API. If it is not running, check the logs for the reason.
(Note: If you run your Ubuntu VM in something like VirtualBox and you try to access it from your Windows machine, make sure you opened the ports in VirtualBox too!).
Docker container has a separate IP address. By default it is private (accessible only from the host-machine).
Docker provides all metadata (including IP address) via its API:
https://docs.docker.io/reference/api/docker_remote_api_v1.10/#inspect-a-container
https://docs.docker.io/reference/api/docker_remote_api_v1.10/#monitor-docker-s-events
You can also take a look at a little tool called docker-gen for inspiration. It monitors docker-events and created configuration-files on host machine using templates.
To obtain the ip address of a docker container, if you know its id (a long hex string) or if you named it:
docker inspect --format '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}' <container-id-or-name>
Docker is running its own network and to get information about it you can run the following commands:
docker network ls
docker network inspect <network name>
docker inspect <container id>
In the output, you should be able to find the IP.
But there is also a couple of things you need to be aware of, regarding Dockerfile and docker run command:
when you EXPOSE a port in Dockerfile, the service in the container is not accessible from outside Docker, but from inside other Docker containers
and when you EXPOSE and use docker run -p ... flag, the service in the container is accessible from anywhere, even outside Docker
So for example, if your apache is running on port 8080 you should expose it in Dockerfile and then you can run it as:
docker run -d -p 8080:8080 <image name> and you should be able to access it from your host on HTTP://localhost:8080.
It is an old question/answer but it might help somebody else ;)
working as of 2020
docker inspect -f '{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}' container_name_or_id

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