Networking between docker containers with docker-host

A snippet to describe an approach we use for deployments...

01 August 2017

From within a Docker container, from time to time you’ll need to access other containers on the same box. Often this can be achieved by the standard Docker environment variables, but as these are set when the container starts up, these require the use of sed or similar to swap out hardcoded values for the dynamically generated location of the containers you’re working with.

It can therefore be useful to just have a docker-host entry to refer to the parent box in /etc/hosts that can then be passed into all containers started on that box. In this way, one could refer for example to memcached via docker-host:11211 when say configuring the Dalli client in Ruby, or DB endpoint for a DB like Stardog which you call over HTTP as simply http://docker-host:5820/database-name/query.

Similarly to memcached, in this way you’d configure Elasticsearch via the elasticsearch-ruby model configuration like so:

Elasticsearch::Model.client = Elasticsearch::Client.new(host: "docker-host:9200")

On the host, in a bash script you can include the following line to add the entry to the hosts file:

echo "`/sbin/ifconfig ens4 | grep 'inet addr:' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}'` docker-host" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Or, where docker is started simply use the --add-host run option to ensure that is available to services inside the container.

docker run -p 127.0.0.1:8080:8080 \
  --env-file=/path/to/env.list \
  --add-host docker-host:`/sbin/ifconfig ens4 | grep 'inet addr:' | cut -d: -f2 | awk '{ print $1}'` \
  --name container-name \
  you/your_project:build_xxx

Networking between docker containers with docker-host

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