[docker] Using --add-host or extra_hosts with docker-compose

I am using docker-compose to run a test environment, that consists of about 5 different containers. The inter-container links and the shared volumes (volumes-from) works wonderfully. I also expose some ports up to the host machine, which works nicely.

What I am missing is a way to link some of my real servers into this environment, without hardcoding ip address. With docker run, you could use --add-host to add another line in your /etc/hosts file. Is there any way to do something similar with docker-compose?

https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/#extra_hosts

extra_hosts - Add hostname mappings. Uses the same values as the docker client --add-host parameter.

extra_hosts:
 - "somehost:162.242.195.82"
 - "otherhost:50.31.209.229"

An entry with the ip address and hostname will be created in /etc/hosts > inside containers for this service, e.g:

162.242.195.82  somehost
50.31.209.229   otherhost

This is in the feature backlog for Compose but it doesn't look like work has been started yet. Github issue.

It seems like it should be made possible to say:

extra_hosts:
 - "loghost:localhost"

So if the part after the colon (normally an IP address) doesn't start with a digit, then name resolution will be performed to look up an IP for localhost, and add something like to the container's /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1 loghost

...assuming that localhost resolves to 127.0.0.1 on the host system.

It looks like it'd be really easy to add in docker-compose's source code: compose/config/types.py's parse_extra_hosts function would likely do it.

For docker itself, this would probably be addable in opts/hosts.go's ValidateExtraHost function, though then it's not strictly validating anymore, so the function would be a little misnamed.

It might actually be a little better to add this to docker, not docker-compose - docker-compose might just get it automatically if docker gets it.

Sadly, this would probably require a container bounce to change an IP address.

Basic docker-compose.yml with extra hosts:

version: '3'
services:
api:
    build: .
    ports:
        - "5003:5003"
    extra_hosts:
        - "your-host.name.com:162.242.195.82" #host and ip
        - "your-host--1.name.com your-host--2.name.com:50.31.209.229" #multiple hostnames with same ip
        

The content in the /etc/hosts file in the created container:

162.242.195.82  your-host.name.com
50.31.209.229   your-host--1.name.com your-host--2.name.com

You can check the /etc/hosts file with the following commands:

$ docker-compose -f path/to/file/docker-compose.yml run api bash  # 'api' is service name
#then inside container bash
root@f7c436910676:/app# cat /etc/hosts