Ports / Networking

Defining containers exposed ports and container-to-container communication

This content is associated with a legacy version of the Replicated product. For the current Replicated product docs, click here.

Ports

The Replicated Native Scheduler does not deploy with an overlay network. All container-to-container communication has to occur on the host networking stack.

All ports listed in the Dockerfile with the EXPOSE directive will be automatically exposed when started. The Docker runtime will choose a random port, ensuring that there are no conflicts. If you need to specify a specific public (host) port, you can list it here. If the disable_publish_all_ports option is specified, ports not specified here will not be exposed.

Common examples of when it is necessary to list an exposed port are for web server containers, or servers which have clients that are incapable of discovering dynamic port mappings.

Port mappings support the Replicated template library.

We can use the ports property to expose a container’s port (private_port) and bind it to the host (public_port). The when property allows us to conditionally expose and bind that port when some prior condition is satisfied. Use the interface property to force the public port to be bound on a specific network interface. The public_port property is optional, allowing a port to be bound to a dynamic port on the host.

    ports:
    - private_port: "80"
      public_port: "80"
      port_type: tcp
      when: '{{repl ConfigOptionEquals "http_enabled" "1" }}'
    - private_port: "443"
      public_port: "443"
      interface: eth0
      port_type: tcp
      when: '{{repl ConfigOptionEquals "https_enabled" "1" }}'

In order to maintain backwards compatibility for versions of Replicated prior to 2.43.0, in addition to the public_port property, a public_port_initial property has been made available to prevent port collisions when exposing a public port when clustering is enabled and cluster_instance_count.initial is greater than one.