It's possible to tie a domain to the docker container when building it? - docker

Question

Currently in the company where I am working on they have a central development server which contains a LAMP environment. Each developer has access to the application as: developer_username.domain.com. The application we're working on uses licenses and the licenses are generated under each domain and are tied to the domain only meaning I can't use license from other developer.
The following example will give you an idea:
developer_1.domain.com ==> license1
developer_2.domain.com ==> license2
developer_n.domain.com ==> licenseN
I am trying to dockerize this enviroment at least having PHP and Apache in a container and I was able to create everything I need and it works. Take a look to this docker-compose.yml:
version: '2'
services:
php-apache:
env_file:
- dev_variables.env
image: reypm/php55-dev
build:
context: .
args:
- PUID=1000
- PGID=1000
ports:
- "80:80"
- "9001:9001"
extra_hosts:
- "dockerhost:xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"
volumes:
- ~/var/www:/var/www
That will build what I need but the problem comes when I try to access the server because I am using http://localhost and then the license won't work and I won't be able to use the application.
The idea is to access as developer_username.domain.com, so my question is: is this a work that should be done on the Dockerfile or the Docker Compose I mean at image/container level let's say by setting up a ENV var perhaps or is this a job for /etc/hosts on the host running the Docker?

Answer 1

tl;dr
No! Docker doesn't do that for you.
Long answer:
What you want to do is to have a custom hostname on the machine hosting docker mapped to a container in Docker compose network. right?
Let's take a step back and see how networking in docker works:
By default Compose sets up a single network for your app. Each container for a service joins the default network and is both reachable by other containers on that network, and discoverable by them at a hostname identical to the container name.
This network is not equal to your host network and without explicit ports exporting (for a specific container) you wouldn't have access to this network. All exposing does, is that:
The exposed port is accessible on the host and the ports are available to any client that can reach the host.
From now on you can put a reverse proxy (like nginx) or you can edit /etc/hosts to define how clients can access the host (i.e. Docker host, the machine running Docker compose).

Answer 2

The hostname is defined when you start the container, overwriting anything you attempt to put inside the image. At a high level, I'd recommend doing this with a mix of custom docker-compose.yml and a volume per developer, but each running an identical image. The docker-compose.yml can include the hostname and domain setting. Then everything else that needs to be hostname specific on the filesystem, and the license itself, should point to files on the volume. Lastly, include an entrypoint that does the right thing if a new hostname is started with a default or empty volume, populating it with the new hostname data and prompting for the license.