Hi Readers, Docker is an open source platform adopted widely to ease the developing, shipping, and running applications. Docker has a object named containers isolates the applications from the infrastructure and avoids any external affect on the development environment.
In this blog we will see some network part of containers. We will see how to enable communication of the container to the outside world or to the other containers. We do this by exposing ports and mapping these ports. Let’s see how we can do that.
Need of exposing ports.
- When a container is created using docker create or docker run, by default it does not publish any of its ports to the outside world.
- In order to make a port available to services outside of Docker, or to Docker containers which are not connected to the container’s network, we can use the -P or -p flag. This creates a firewall rule which maps a container port to a port on the Docker host to the outside world.
- -p or –publish list : Publishes a container’s port(s) to the host.
- -P or –publish-all : Publishes all exposed ports to random ports.
Let’s see how we can achieve this,
Create a nginx container without any port mapping,
docker container run -d nginx
This will pull the nginx image from the docker hub and create a container for us.
Check the port for nginx container
docker container ls
This shows the nginx container. We have tcp port for port 80. However it is yet not mapped.
Check if we get any response from localhost
curl localhost
Connection refused because we don’t have port mapping set for port 80.
Get the privateIP of the container
docker inspect container
Execute
curl This will give content of nginx home page.
Expose port 3000 on container
Once we expose the port, it means now this port is available to be mapped. We can re-map them using -p or -P flag.
docker container run -d --expose 3000 nginx
Verify if port 3000 is open
docker container ls
Alternatively we can expose and map the port at the same time,
docker container run -d --expose 3000 -p 80:8080
80: port that will be running on host machine.
8080: container port mapped with port 80.Mapping TCP and UDP ports
docker container run -d -p 8081:80/tcp -p 8081:80/udp nginx
curl localhost:8081
We can see all the port mappings for specified container,
docker container port <containerID>
That’s all for this blog. Thanks for sticking till the end. In case of any queries you can contact me over my email id nitin.mishra@knoldus.com
