[linux] How can I get Docker Linux container information from within the container itself?

I would like to make my docker containers aware of their configuration, the same way you can get information about EC2 instances through metadata.

I can use (provided docker is listening on port 4243)

curl http://172.17.42.1:4243/containers/$HOSTNAME/json

to get some of its data, but would like to know if there is a better way at least the get the full ID of the container, because HOSTNAME is actually shortened to 12 characters and docker seems to perform a "best match" on it.

Also, how can I get the external IP of the docker host (other than accessing the EC2 metadata, which is specific to AWS)

Unless overridden, the hostname seems to be the short container id in Docker 1.12

root@d2258e6dec11:/project# cat /etc/hostname
d2258e6dec11

Externally

$ docker ps -a
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND             CREATED                 STATUS                      PORTS               NAMES
d2258e6dec11        300518d26271        "bash"              5 minutes ago       

$ docker -v
Docker version 1.12.0, build 8eab29e, experimental

A comment by madeddie looks most elegant to me:

CID=$(basename $(cat /proc/1/cpuset))

awk -F'[:/]' '(($4 == "docker") && (lastId != $NF)) { lastId = $NF; print $NF; }' /proc/self/cgroup

As an aside, if you have the pid of the container and want to get the docker id of that container, a good way is to use nsenter in combination with the sed magic above:

nsenter -n -m -t pid -- cat /proc/1/cgroup | grep -o -e "docker-.*.scope" | head -n 1 | sed "s/docker-\(.*\).scope/\\1/"

I've found that in 17.09 there is a simplest way to do it within docker container:

$ cat /proc/self/cgroup | head -n 1 | cut -d '/' -f3
4de1c09d3f1979147cd5672571b69abec03d606afcc7bdc54ddb2b69dec3861c

Or like it has already been told, a shorter version with

$ cat /etc/hostname
4de1c09d3f19

Or simply:

$ hostname
4de1c09d3f19

You can communicate with docker from inside of a container using unix socket via Docker Remote API:

https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/api/docker_remote_api/

In a container, you can find out a shortedned docker id by examining $HOSTNAME env var. According to doc, there is a small chance of collision, I think that for small number of container, you do not have to worry about it. I don't know how to get full id directly.

You can inspect container similar way as outlined in banyan answer:

GET /containers/4abbef615af7/json HTTP/1.1

Response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
         "Id": "4abbef615af7......  ",
         "Created": "2013.....",
         ...
}

Alternatively, you can transfer docker id to the container in a file. The file is located on "mounted volume" so it is transfered to container:

docker run -t -i -cidfile /mydir/host1.txt -v /mydir:/mydir ubuntu /bin/bash

The docker id (shortened) will be in file /mydir/host1.txt in the container.

I believe that the "problem" with all of the above is that it depends upon a certain implementation convention either of docker itself or its implementation and how that interacts with cgroups and /proc, and not via a committed, public, API, protocol or convention as part of the OCI specs.

Hence these solutions are "brittle" and likely to break when least expected when implementations change, or conventions are overridden by user configuration.

container and image ids should be injected into the r/t environment by the component that initiated the container instance, if for no other reason than to permit code running therein to use that information to uniquely identify themselves for logging/tracing etc...

just my $0.02, YMMV...

To make it simple,

1. Container ID is your host name inside docker
2. Container information is available inside /proc/self/cgroup

To get host name,

hostname

or

uname -n

or

cat /etc/host

Output can be redirected to any file & read back from application E.g.: # hostname > /usr/src//hostname.txt

Use docker inspect.

$ docker ps # get conteiner id
$ docker inspect 4abbef615af7
[{
    "ID": "4abbef615af780f24991ccdca946cd50d2422e75f53fb15f578e14167c365989",
    "Created": "2014-01-08T07:13:32.765612597Z",
    "Path": "/bin/bash",
    "Args": [
        "-c",
        "/start web"
    ],
    "Config": {
        "Hostname": "4abbef615af7",
...

Can get ip as follows.

$ docker inspect -format="{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}" 2a5624c52119
172.17.0.24

WARNING: You should understand the security risks of this method before you consider it. John's summary of the risk:

By giving the container access to /var/run/docker.sock, it is [trivially easy] to break out of the containment provided by docker and gain access to the host machine. Obviously this is potentially dangerous.

Inside the container, the dockerId is your hostname. So, you could:

• install the docker-io package in your container with the same version as the host
• start it with --volume /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock --privileged
• finally, run: docker inspect $(hostname) inside the container

Avoid this. Only do it if you understand the risks and have a clear mitigation for the risks.

Some posted solutions have stopped working due to changes in the format of /proc/self/cgroup. Here is a single GNU grep command that should be a bit more robust to format changes:

grep -o -P -m1 'docker.*\K[0-9a-f]{64,}' /proc/self/cgroup

For reference, here are snippits of /proc/self/cgroup from inside docker containers that have been tested with this command:

Linux 4.4:

11:pids:/system.slice/docker-cde7c2bab394630a42d73dc610b9c57415dced996106665d427f6d0566594411.scope
...
1:name=systemd:/system.slice/docker-cde7c2bab394630a42d73dc610b9c57415dced996106665d427f6d0566594411.scope

Linux 4.8 - 4.13:

11:hugetlb:/docker/afe96d48db6d2c19585572f986fc310c92421a3dac28310e847566fb82166013
...
1:name=systemd:/docker/afe96d48db6d2c19585572f986fc310c92421a3dac28310e847566fb82166013

Docker sets the hostname to the container ID by default, but users can override this with --hostname. Instead, inspect /proc:

$ more /proc/self/cgroup
14:name=systemd:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
13:pids:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
12:hugetlb:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
11:net_prio:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
10:perf_event:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
9:net_cls:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
8:freezer:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
7:devices:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
6:memory:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
5:blkio:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
4:cpuacct:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
3:cpu:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
2:cpuset:/docker/7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605
1:name=openrc:/docker

Here's a handy one-liner to extract the container ID:

$ grep "memory:/" < /proc/self/cgroup | sed 's|.*/||'
7be92808767a667f35c8505cbf40d14e931ef6db5b0210329cf193b15ba9d605

This will get the full container id from within a container:

cat /proc/self/cgroup | grep "cpu:/" | sed 's/\([0-9]\):cpu:\/docker\///g'

You can use this command line to identify the current container ID (tested with docker 1.9).

awk -F"-|/." '/1:/ {print $3}' /proc/self/cgroup

Then, a little request to Docker API (you can share /var/run/docker.sock) to retrieve all informations.