Whenn you run a lot of containers inside of a docker host, you can get lost of the forwarded ports. Let’s say you have 3 instances all exposing 3 ports: 22, 80 and 443. Docker will automatically assign ‘random’ port numbers like:

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ID            ...  PORTS
656eb7831dda  ...  49162->22, 49163->80, 49164->443   
ff2141eb218d  ...  49159->22, 49160->80, 49161->443   
54b9dfd5400c  ...  49156->22, 49157->80, 49158->443   

Now its hard to remember all those ports, and is confusing that if you want to ssh into the first one, you use ssh root@docker -p 49162 and in the browser you would use: http://docker:49163.

There is an even bigger problem with random ports. Wehn your http server sometimes redirects you to https, you need the standard port numbers. The webserver running inside of a docker container, will redirect you to port 443 which will not be correct port (49164 in our case)

So it would be much natural for the docker instances to use their ip address, with straight port numbers. But those ip addresses are only valid inside of the docker host. How to do the magic?

SSH is yor best friend

There is complete SOCKS proxy hidden indide of ssh. To get it alive you just have to toss a -D 1099 parameter, and boom, it will listen on your localhost’s 1099 port and act as a proxy. So here is a how you create an ssh based tunnel :

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ssh -qTfN2 -D 1099 docker

For the curious the parameter meanings:

• q :- be very quite
• T :- Do not allocate a pseudo tty
• f :- move the ssh process to background
• N :- Do not execute remote command.
• 2 :- Forces ssh to try protocol version 2 only.

docker internal IPs

How can you get the internal ip of a container? You can get all the dirty details by: sudo docker inspect XXXXX. For the moment the only interresting this is the IP addresses. So the oneliner is:

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for i in $(sudo docker ps -q); do sudo docker inspect $i| grep IPA; done

it will create the following list:

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    "IPAddress": "172.17.0.12",
    "IPAddress": "172.17.0.11",
    "IPAddress": "172.17.0.10",

SOCKS proxy

Now all the programs which can use a SOCKS proxy can access the docker containers. For example let’s poke the first containers webserver with curl

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curl --proxy socks5h://localhost:1099  172.17.0.10

for a java process ypu can specify it by system properties: -DsocksProxyHost=127.0.0.1 -DsocksProxyPort=1099

SOCKS proxy for the browser

You have probably already uses an http proxy in your browser. In that case all trafic goes throught the http proxy. For our usecase what we wan is:

• accessing docker containers via SOCKS proxy
• all other shoud be accessed directly

Luckily thus problem is already solved by the Proxy auto-config or shortly PAC. Its a JavaScript function which returns with the connection type: PROXY/SOCKS/DIRECT. See the sample below:

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function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
 
        // URLs within this network are accessed through
        // socks proxy provided by ssh -D
        if (isInNet(host, "172.17.0.0", "255.255.0.0"))
        {
                return "SOCKS 127.0.0.1:1099";
        }
 
        return "DIRECT";
}

SSH doesn’t need a SOCKS proxy

We use ssh to create a SOCKS proxy, which can be used by other programs java/browser/curl and so on. But ssh is clever enough that if there is no SOCKS proxy opened, it can create it on demand:

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ssh -o ProxyCommand='ssh user@10.253.129.151 nc %h %p' user@targetsshserver.example.com

This tells ssh that instead of connecting directly to targetsshserver.example.com’s port 22, use a ProxyCommand to create the connection.

In this case the command itself is an ssh: ssh user@docker nc %h %p which means start a NetCat (nc host port) via ssh.