Give a docker container full access to host's network

2014, Jun 12 One min read

When a docker container is run, is has networking enabled with its own network stack. That means:

It uses its own ports
To give access from the host to the container one has to forward ports
Giving access from the container to the host is not as easy as it seems. Basically there’s no official way for the container to find out host’s IP. There are workarounds

An easy way to give the container full access to the host is to have the container use the same stack as the host by using –net host switch at run time.

For example, it makes it trivial to run an nginx reverse proxy, inside a container, to serve a webapp started on the host.