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Accessing Host Services from Docker Containers

Mohammad Javad Naderi on February 18, 2024

Accessing a host service from within a Docker container is a common requirement. For instance, you might have a HTTP proxy running on the host syst...

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suriya786 • Mar 13

Thank you for the great article.

Mohammad Javad Naderi • Mar 13

You're welcome. :)

Mohammad • Feb 19

Awesome! I used it to port my proxy, which was alive in my host machine, to my containers without giving them access to the host network. Thanks Mohammad Javad :)

Mohammad Javad Naderi • Feb 19

You're welcome! I'm glad that this post was helpful to you.

jquintanilla4 • Apr 10

Mate, cheers for this. I've been looking for a solution like this for days.

Mohammad Javad Naderi • Apr 24

Thank you for your feedback!

Lamp • Jun 1

You can bind the database server to both 127.0.0.1 and 172.17.0.1. SMH.

Also. If you're connecting on the same host it's better to use UNIX sockets. Just mount the socket dir into the container.

volumes:
  - "/run/postgresql:/run/postgresql"

Mohammad Javad Naderi • Jun 23 • Edited

Thanks for your feedback.

You can bind the database server to both 127.0.0.1 and 172.17.0.1.

I mentioned this solution in the article: "The other workaround is to bind the database server to 172.17.0.1, but other apps that rely on 127.0.0.1:5432 will break."

I know that PostgreSQL can bind to multiple IP addresses (so we can bind to both 127.0.0.1 and 172.17.0.1), but I did not mention that our database is PostgreSQL. Plus, "database" is just an example. It could be any service, for example, an HTTP proxy, or anything else that other apps expect to be available at 127.0.0.1 and that service may have no configuration to bind to multiple IP addresses or use UNIX sockets.

And what if the IP 172.17.0.1 changes in a new version of Docker? This solution does not rely on hard-coded IP 172.17.0.1.

Update: I edited the post and made it more general (removed "database" and 5432).