Automagic discover docker containers with dnsdock and CoreOs

Published on July 10, 2015

Note: This is the second part of How I develop in PHP with CoreOS and Docker. I recommend reading that post first to get a better view on this post.

Docker is an awesome tool for developing all kinds of applications in an isolated environment. Altough I came across some minor issues and flaws.

Run only one container on a specific port
Manually add a container’ IP and domainname in /etc/hosts

I managed to fix these flaws with dnsdock. dnsdock is a DNS service discovery for Docker containers written in golang. In other words, everytime I start a container the dnsdock service, which is also a container, creates a new dns record pointing to the IP of this container. This is awesome! Why? Because I don’t need configure a specific port-forwarding to the host machine AND domainnames are added automaticaly. It’s also possible to add one or more aliases to a specific container.

How to setup

Since I’m using the Docker in CoreOs setup from my previous post - How I develop in PHP with CoreOS and Docker - all we need to do is the following:

Autostart the dnsdock service with CoreOs
Add nameserver entry in /etc/resolver/docker to lookup in the dnsdock service
Edit the Vagrantfile, so CoreOS accept packets for other IPs
Add a custom route for all the container IPs to the CoreOS IP
Optional: Add alias domain(s) to your docker command or docker-compose.yml

Autostart `dnsdock` with CoreOS

Edit the user-data file in coreos-vagrant and add the following under the units section.

- name: dnsdock.service
  enable: true
  command: start
  content: |
    [Unit]
    Description=dnsdock
    After=docker.service
    Requires=docker.service

    [Service]
    EnvironmentFile=/etc/environment
    ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c '/usr/bin/docker rm -f dnsdock || ls > /dev/null'
    ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c '/usr/bin/docker pull tonistiigi/dnsdock'
    ExecStart=/usr/bin/docker run -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock  --name dnsdock -p ${COREOS_PRIVATE_IPV4}:53:53/udp tonistiigi/dnsdock
    ExecStop=/bin/sh -c '/usr/bin/docker stop dnsdock  || ls > /dev/null'

Add nameserver entry in `/etc/resolver/docker`

This way Mac OS X will do a dns lookup for all domains ending with .docker. It’s also possible to change this to a custom development domain, example: dev.jverdeyen.be

echo "nameserver 172.17.8.101" >> /etc/resolver/docker

Edit the Vagrantfile

This will enable promiscuity for some private network interfaces and accept all incoming packages.

...

if File.exist?(CLOUD_CONFIG_PATH)
  config.vm.provision :file, :source => "#{CLOUD_CONFIG_PATH}", :destination => "/tmp/vagrantfile-user-data"
  config.vm.provision :shell, :inline => "mv /tmp/vagrantfile-user-data /var/lib/coreos-vagrant/", :privileged => true
end

# add these 3 lines
config.vm.provider :virtualbox do |vb|
  vb.customize ["modifyvm", :id, "--nicpromisc2", "allow-all"]
end

...

Add a custom route for all the container IPs to the CoreOS IP

Make sure Mac OS X routes all container traffic to the CoreOS VM.

sudo route -n add -net 10.1.0.0  172.17.8.101

Reload vagrant

Vagrant will re-provision the CoreOS settings and startup dnsdock on boot.

vagrant reload --provision

Note: Sometimes I need to do this twice, because the user_data changes were not applied properly.

Check dnsdock services

Visit http://dnsdock.docker/services to see all discovered services. You can access a running container on containername.imagename.docker as hostname.

Custom domains

You can add a docker environment variable DNSDOCK_ALIAS to a container.

docker run --name=nginxtesting -e DNSDOCK_ALIAS="alsohere.docker" yappabe/nginx

This allows you to access this container on: nginxtesting.docker and alsohere.docker.

The same can be done in a docker-compose.yml file.

nginx:
  image: yappabe/nginx
  environment:
      DNSDOCK_ALIAS: web1.docker,web2.docker

Footnote

There is so much more you can achieve with this dnsdock service.

Thanks for reading

Feel free to leave a comment if you have remarks or like this post

Joeri Verdeyen