How do I SSH to a Docker in Mac container

macos ssh docker beta
Pantharian picture Pantharian · Jun 22, 2016 · Viewed 14.1k times · Source

I am running Docker for Mac (Version 1.12.0-rc2-beta16 (Build: 9493)).

I have pulled an image from my local repository, and used 'docker run -d' to create a container. Using 'docker ps' I obtained the 'CONTAINER ID', and then used 'docker inspect <CONTAINER_ID>| grep IPA' to obtain the IP address for the running container.

I now want to connect to the container using SSH with 'ssh root@<IP address>' but the command gives the following error: 'Operation timed out'.

Further investigation shows that I can not ping the <IP address> -> 'Request timeout for icmp_seq 0'

How can I connect to the container using SSH? What is the correct command?

UPDATE: This IS NOT a duplicate (as stated above). The entry that begins "The scenario you described" is the correct solution.

Answer

s00150515 picture s00150515 · Jun 22, 2016

The scenario you have described is the approach that would be used on 'normal' Docker.

As Docker on Mac has been created from scratch specifically for the Mac, it has been tweaked to make it easier to use. Therefore, the IP address of the container cannot be used in this way on the Mac.

The documentation Getting Started with Docker for Mac states that:

Previous beta releases used docker as the hostname to build the URL. From this release forward, ports are exposed on the private IP addresses of the VM and forwarded to localhost with no other host name set. See also, Release Notes for Beta 9.

Therefore, the correct way to SSH into a container is to spin it up on Docker for Mac using a port mapping to the SSH port (22). e.g.

 docker run -d -p 2022:22 <Image Name>

And the SSH connection is instigated using this command (N.B. it uses 'localhost' on the port specified instead of having to determine and use the container's IP Address):

 ssh -p 2022 root@localhost

N.B. It is NOT possible to simply map port 22 to itself i.e. '-p 22:22' as this caused the following error (at least is did for me!):

docker: Error response from daemon: driver failed programming external connectivity on endpoint pensive_wilson (2e832b82fc67d3e48864975c6eb02f6c099e34eee64b29634cfde286c41e00a7): Error starting userland proxy: Failed to bind: EADDRINUSE.

Related questions

Using ssh-agent with docker on macOS

I would like to use ssh-agent to forward my keys into the docker image and pull from a private github repo. I am using a slightly modified version of https://github.com/phusion/passenger-docker with boot2docker on Yosemite. ssh-add …

Read More
How to get ssh connection with docker container on OSX(boot2docker)

I use docker on OSX with boot2docker. I want to get an Ssh connection from my terminal into a running container. But I can't do this :( I think it's because Docker is running in a virtual machine.

Read More
Use PPK file in Mac Terminal to connect to remote connection over SSH

I have been using Putty on Windows XP and used the .ppk file to connect to my Linux servers (several servers). On the servers I have the following folder and file ~/.ssh/authorized_keys I now want to use a …

Read More