Working locally with Docker containers

Over the weekend I wrote a small tool that will automatically update the /etc/hosts file with your running docker container. You can find the script here: https://github.com/Spielstunde/docker-hosts-update

Example usage

First create a docker network. This will allow the containers to connect to each other and automatically resolve hostnames. This is most of the magic tbh.

docker network create evilcorp.internal

Now you can start new containers in the network:

docker run --network evilcorp.internal --rm -it nginx
docker run --network evilcorp.internal --name hello --rm -it nginx

After starting the above two container you can then start …

sudo docker-hosts-update

… and you should see a section like this in your /etc/hosts file.

# ! docker-hosts-update start !
# This section was automatically generated by docker-hosts-update
# Don't edit this part manually :)
172.20.0.2   hello.evilcorp.internal
172.20.0.3   friendly_golick.evilcorp.internal
# ! docker-hosts-update end   !

Because these networks are on the same bridged network, docker will first of all ensure that their hostnames resolve to each other. E.g. in the first container it will be able to connect to the “hello” container, either via hello.evilcorp.internal or just hello.

What my script does is easily enable the host machine to resolve the hostnames too. This saves you the trouble of either getting the ip manually (because hostname, duh) but also removes the need for other approaches where you need to assign different ports to different containers, and then use some sort of service discovery tool and proxy to manage them. On both host and container the url http://hello.evilcorp.internal will resolve to the correct container.

Finally when you stop the containers using Ctrl+C or docker stop hello, you’ll see the lines automatically removed from the hosts file, if docker-hosts-update is still running.