How to control host from docker container?
For example, how to execute copied to host bash script?
This answer is just a more detailed version of Bradford Medeiros's solution, which for me as well turned out to be the best answer, so credit goes to him.
In his answer, he explains WHAT to do (named pipes) but not exactly HOW to do it.
I have to admit I didn't know what named pipes were when I read his solution. So I struggled to implement it (while it's actually very simple), but I did succeed.
So the point of my answer is just detailing the commands you need to run in order to get it working, but again, credit goes to him.
PART 1 - Testing the named pipe concept without docker
On the main host, chose the folder where you want to put your named pipe file, for instance /path/to/pipe/ and a pipe name, for instance mypipe, and then run:
mkfifo /path/to/pipe/mypipe
The pipe is created.
Type
ls -l /path/to/pipe/mypipe
And check the access rights start with "p", such as
prw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 mypipe
Now run:
tail -f /path/to/pipe/mypipe
The terminal is now waiting for data to be sent into this pipe
Now open another terminal window.
And then run:
echo "hello world" > /path/to/pipe/mypipe
Check the first terminal (the one with tail -f), it should display "hello world"
PART 2 - Run commands through the pipe
On the host container, instead of running tail -f which just outputs whatever is sent as input, run this command that will execute it as commands:
eval "$(cat /path/to/pipe/mypipe)"
Then, from the other terminal, try running:
echo "ls -l" > /path/to/pipe/mypipe
Go back to the first terminal and you should see the result of the ls -l command.
PART 3 - Make it listen forever
You may have noticed that in the previous part, right after ls -l output is displayed, it stops listening for commands.
Instead of eval "$(cat /path/to/pipe/mypipe)", run:
while true; do eval "$(cat /path/to/pipe/mypipe)"; done
(you can nohup that)
Now you can send unlimited number of commands one after the other, they will all be executed, not just the first one.
PART 4 - Make it work even when reboot happens
The only caveat is if the host has to reboot, the "while" loop will stop working.
To handle reboot, here what I've done:
Put the while true; do eval "$(cat /path/to/pipe/mypipe)"; done in a file called execpipe.sh with #!/bin/bash header
Don't forget to chmod +x it
Add it to crontab by running
crontab -e
And then adding
#reboot /path/to/execpipe.sh
At this point, test it: reboot your server, and when it's back up, echo some commands into the pipe and check if they are executed.
Of course, you aren't able to see the output of commands, so ls -l won't help, but touch somefile will help.
Another option is to modify the script to put the output in a file, such as:
while true; do eval "$(cat /path/to/pipe/mypipe)" &> /somepath/output.txt; done
Now you can run ls -l and the output (both stdout and stderr using &> in bash) should be in output.txt.
PART 5 - Make it work with docker
If you are using both docker compose and dockerfile like I do, here is what I've done:
Let's assume you want to mount the mypipe's parent folder as /hostpipe in your container
Add this:
VOLUME /hostpipe
in your dockerfile in order to create a mount point
Then add this:
volumes:
- /path/to/pipe:/hostpipe
in your docker compose file in order to mount /path/to/pipe as /hostpipe
Restart your docker containers.
PART 6 - Testing
Exec into your docker container:
docker exec -it <container> bash
Go into the mount folder and check you can see the pipe:
cd /hostpipe && ls -l
Now try running a command from within the container:
echo "touch this_file_was_created_on_main_host_from_a_container.txt" > /hostpipe/mypipe
And it should work!
WARNING: If you have an OSX (Mac OS) host and a Linux container, it won't work (explanation here https://stackoverflow.com/a/43474708/10018801 and issue here https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/483 ) because the pipe implementation is not the same, so what you write into the pipe from Linux can be read only by a Linux and what you write into the pipe from Mac OS can be read only by a Mac OS (this sentence might not be very accurate, but just be aware that a cross-platform issue exists).
For instance, when I run my docker setup in DEV from my Mac OS computer, the named pipe as explained above does not work. But in staging and production, I have Linux host and Linux containers, and it works perfectly.
PART 7 - Example from Node.JS container
Here is how I send a command from my Node.JS container to the main host and retrieve the output:
const pipePath = "/hostpipe/mypipe"
const outputPath = "/hostpipe/output.txt"
const commandToRun = "pwd && ls-l"
console.log("delete previous output")
if (fs.existsSync(outputPath)) fs.unlinkSync(outputPath)
console.log("writing to pipe...")
const wstream = fs.createWriteStream(pipePath)
wstream.write(commandToRun)
wstream.close()
console.log("waiting for output.txt...") //there are better ways to do that than setInterval
let timeout = 10000 //stop waiting after 10 seconds (something might be wrong)
const timeoutStart = Date.now()
const myLoop = setInterval(function () {
if (Date.now() - timeoutStart > timeout) {
clearInterval(myLoop);
console.log("timed out")
} else {
//if output.txt exists, read it
if (fs.existsSync(outputPath)) {
clearInterval(myLoop);
const data = fs.readFileSync(outputPath).toString()
if (fs.existsSync(outputPath)) fs.unlinkSync(outputPath) //delete the output file
console.log(data) //log the output of the command
}
}
}, 300);
Use a named pipe.
On the host OS, create a script to loop and read commands, and then you call eval on that.
Have the docker container read to that named pipe.
To be able to access the pipe, you need to mount it via a volume.
This is similar to the SSH mechanism (or a similar socket-based method), but restricts you properly to the host device, which is probably better. Plus you don't have to be passing around authentication information.
My only warning is to be cautious about why you are doing this. It's totally something to do if you want to create a method to self-upgrade with user input or whatever, but you probably don't want to call a command to get some config data, as the proper way would be to pass that in as args/volume into docker. Also, be cautious about the fact that you are evaling, so just give the permission model a thought.
Some of the other answers such as running a script. Under a volume won't work generically since they won't have access to the full system resources, but it might be more appropriate depending on your usage.
The solution I use is to connect to the host over SSH and execute the command like this:
ssh -l ${USERNAME} ${HOSTNAME} "${SCRIPT}"
UPDATE
As this answer keeps getting up votes, I would like to remind (and highly recommend), that the account which is being used to invoke the script should be an account with no permissions at all, but only executing that script as sudo (that can be done from sudoers file).
UPDATE: Named Pipes
The solution I suggested above was only the one I used while I was relatively new to Docker. Now in 2021 take a look on the answers that talk about Named Pipes. This seems to be a better solution.
However, nobody there mentioned anything about security. The script that will evaluate the commands sent through the pipe (the script that calls eval) must actually not use eval for the whole pipe output, but to handle specific cases and call the required commands according to the text sent, otherwise any command that can do anything can be sent through the pipe.
That REALLY depends on what you need that bash script to do!
For example, if the bash script just echoes some output, you could just do
docker run --rm -v $(pwd)/mybashscript.sh:/mybashscript.sh ubuntu bash /mybashscript.sh
Another possibility is that you want the bash script to install some software- say the script to install docker-compose. you could do something like
docker run --rm -v /usr/bin:/usr/bin --privileged -v $(pwd)/mybashscript.sh:/mybashscript.sh ubuntu bash /mybashscript.sh
But at this point you're really getting into having to know intimately what the script is doing to allow the specific permissions it needs on your host from inside the container.
My laziness led me to find the easiest solution that wasn't published as an answer here.
It is based on the great article by luc juggery.
All you need to do in order to gain a full shell to your linux host from within your docker container is:
docker run --privileged --pid=host -it alpine:3.8 \
nsenter -t 1 -m -u -n -i sh
Explanation:
--privileged : grants additional permissions to the container, it allows the container to gain access to the devices of the host (/dev)
--pid=host : allows the containers to use the processes tree of the Docker host (the VM in which the Docker daemon is running)
nsenter utility: allows to run a process in existing namespaces (the building blocks that provide isolation to containers)
nsenter (-t 1 -m -u -n -i sh) allows to run the process sh in the same isolation context as the process with PID 1.
The whole command will then provide an interactive sh shell in the VM
This setup has major security implications and should be used with cautions (if any).
Write a simple server python server listening on a port (say 8080), bind the port -p 8080:8080 with the container, make a HTTP request to localhost:8080 to ask the python server running shell scripts with popen, run a curl or writing code to make a HTTP request curl -d '{"foo":"bar"}' localhost:8080
#!/usr/bin/python
from BaseHTTPServer import BaseHTTPRequestHandler,HTTPServer
import subprocess
import json
PORT_NUMBER = 8080
# This class will handles any incoming request from
# the browser
class myHandler(BaseHTTPRequestHandler):
def do_POST(self):
content_len = int(self.headers.getheader('content-length'))
post_body = self.rfile.read(content_len)
self.send_response(200)
self.end_headers()
data = json.loads(post_body)
# Use the post data
cmd = "your shell cmd"
p = subprocess.Popen(cmd, stdout=subprocess.PIPE, shell=True)
p_status = p.wait()
(output, err) = p.communicate()
print "Command output : ", output
print "Command exit status/return code : ", p_status
self.wfile.write(cmd + "\n")
return
try:
# Create a web server and define the handler to manage the
# incoming request
server = HTTPServer(('', PORT_NUMBER), myHandler)
print 'Started httpserver on port ' , PORT_NUMBER
# Wait forever for incoming http requests
server.serve_forever()
except KeyboardInterrupt:
print '^C received, shutting down the web server'
server.socket.close()
If you are not worried about security and you're simply looking to start a docker container on the host from within another docker container like the OP, you can share the docker server running on the host with the docker container by sharing it's listen socket.
Please see https://docs.docker.com/engine/security/security/#docker-daemon-attack-surface and see if your personal risk tolerance allows this for this particular application.
You can do this by adding the following volume args to your start command
docker run -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock ...
or by sharing /var/run/docker.sock within your docker compose file like this:
version: '3'
services:
ci:
command: ...
image: ...
volumes:
- /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
When you run the docker start command within your docker container,
the docker server running on your host will see the request and provision the sibling container.
credit: http://jpetazzo.github.io/2015/09/03/do-not-use-docker-in-docker-for-ci/
As Marcus reminds, docker is basically process isolation. Starting with docker 1.8, you can copy files both ways between the host and the container, see the doc of docker cp
https://docs.docker.com/reference/commandline/cp/
Once a file is copied, you can run it locally
docker run --detach-keys="ctrl-p" -it -v /:/mnt/rootdir --name testing busybox
# chroot /mnt/rootdir
#
I have a simple approach.
Step 1: Mount /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock (So you will be able to execute docker commands inside your container)
Step 2: Execute this below inside your container. The key part here is (--network host as this will execute from host context)
docker run -i --rm --network host -v /opt/test.sh:/test.sh alpine:3.7
sh /test.sh
test.sh should contain the some commands (ifconfig, netstat etc...) whatever you need.
Now you will be able to get host context output.
You can use the pipe concept, but use a file on the host and fswatch to accomplish the goal to execute a script on the host machine from a docker container. Like so (Use at your own risk):
#! /bin/bash
touch .command_pipe
chmod +x .command_pipe
# Use fswatch to execute a command on the host machine and log result
fswatch -o --event Updated .command_pipe | \
xargs -n1 -I "{}" .command_pipe >> .command_pipe_log &
docker run -it --rm \
--name alpine \
-w /home/test \
-v $PWD/.command_pipe:/dev/command_pipe \
alpine:3.7 sh
rm -rf .command_pipe
kill %1
In this example, inside the container send commands to /dev/command_pipe, like so:
/home/test # echo 'docker network create test2.network.com' > /dev/command_pipe
On the host, you can check if the network was created:
$ docker network ls | grep test2
8e029ec83afe test2.network.com bridge local
In my scenario I just ssh login the host (via host ip) within a container and then I can do anything I want to the host machine
I found answers using named pipes awesome. But I was wondering if there is a way to get the output of the executed command.
The solution is to create two named pipes:
mkfifo /path/to/pipe/exec_in
mkfifo /path/to/pipe/exec_out
Then, the solution using a loop, as suggested by #Vincent, would become:
# on the host
while true; do eval "$(cat exec_in)" > exec_out; done
And then on the docker container, we can execute the command and get the output using:
# on the container
echo "ls -l" > /path/to/pipe/exec_in
cat /path/to/pipe/exec_out
If anyone interested, my need was to use a failover IP on the host from the container, I created this simple ruby method:
def fifo_exec(cmd)
exec_in = '/path/to/pipe/exec_in'
exec_out = '/path/to/pipe/exec_out'
%x[ echo #{cmd} > #{exec_in} ]
%x[ cat #{exec_out} ]
end
# example
fifo_exec "curl https://ip4.seeip.org"
Depending on the situation, this could be a helpful resource.
This uses a job queue (Celery) that can be run on the host, commands/data could be passed to this through Redis (or rabbitmq). In the example below, this is occurring in a django application (which is commonly dockerized).
https://www.codingforentrepreneurs.com/blog/celery-redis-django/
To expand on user2915097's response:
The idea of isolation is to be able to restrict what an application/process/container (whatever your angle at this is) can do to the host system very clearly. Hence, being able to copy and execute a file would really break the whole concept.
Yes. But it's sometimes necessary.
No. That's not the case, or Docker is not the right thing to use. What you should do is declare a clear interface for what you want to do (e.g. updating a host config), and write a minimal client/server to do exactly that and nothing more. Generally, however, this doesn't seem to be very desirable. In many cases, you should simply rethink your approach and eradicate that need. Docker came into an existence when basically everything was a service that was reachable using some protocol. I can't think of any proper usecase of a Docker container getting the rights to execute arbitrary stuff on the host.
I have to implement to my Distributed systems class the Berkeley Algorithm and I chose to do it in python with sockets. The master is supposed to run in the host and the slaves in docker containers.
The closest I got from connecting from host (as a master) to the container (as the slave) was exposing the ports with the -p 9000:9000 flag the running the container, the host connects successfully to the container but doesn't receive or send anything (the same thing for the container) with that I have came to the conclusion that the python socket inside the process simply is not receiving packets from the port. I have already tried using -net=host flag but the host simply can't find the container. One progress that I had was to instantiate two docker containers and pinging one from another using the hostname provided in /etc/hosts but this is not what I really want.
I have the whole code in github if you need the source. The code is commented in English, but the documentation is in Portuguese
Summarising all I want to do is to open a socket with python inside a docker container and be able to reach in the host machine, what kind of network configuration do I need to do be able to do that?
EDIT: More info
The following bash script is used to instantiate three docker containers then execute a command into each one of them to clone my repo, cd into it and into a test folder containing a bash to execute a slave and then start the master at host:
docker run -it -d -p 127.0.0.1:9000:9000/tcp --name slave1 python bash
docker run -it -d -p 127.0.0.1:9001:9001/tcp --name slave2 python bash
docker run -it -d -p 127.0.0.1:9002:9002/tcp --name slave3 python bash
docker exec -t -d slave1 bash -c 'git clone https://github.com/guilhermePaciulli/BerkeleyAlgorithm.git;cd BerkeleyAlgorithm;git pull;cd test;bash slave_1.sh'
sleep 1
docker exec -t -d slave2 bash -c 'git clone https://github.com/guilhermePaciulli/BerkeleyAlgorithm.git;cd BerkeleyAlgorithm;git pull;cd test;bash slave_2.sh'
sleep 1
docker exec -t -d slave3 bash -c 'git clone https://github.com/guilhermePaciulli/BerkeleyAlgorithm.git;cd BerkeleyAlgorithm;git pull;cd test;bash slave_3.sh'
sleep 1
bash test/master.sh
To start each instance I use another bash command
To instantiate the slave I use:
python ../main.py -s 127.0.0.1:9000 175 logs/slave_log_1.txt
The -s is a flag to tell the main.py class that this is a slave, the 127.0.0.1:9000 are the ip and port that this slave is going to listen (and the master is going to connect) and the rest are just configurations (this example is used for the first slave).
And to instantiate the master I use:
python ./main.py -m 127.0.0.1:8080 185 15 test/slaves.txt test/logs/master_log.txt
Just like the slave the -m tells main that this is a master, 127.0.0.1:8080 are the ip and port that the master is going to connect to the slave and the rest are just configurations.
When you run a server-type process inside a Docker container, it needs to be configured to listen on the special "all interfaces" address 0.0.0.0. Each container has its own notion of localhost or 127.0.0.1, and if you set a process to listen or bind to 127.0.0.1, it can only be reached from its own localhost which is different from all other containers' localhost and the host's localhost.
In the server command you show, you'd run something like
python ../main.py -s 0.0.0.0:9000 175 logs/slave_log_1.txt
(Stringly consider building a Dockerfile to describe how to build and start your image. Starting a bunch of empty containers, git clone into each, and then manually launching processes is a lot of manual work to be lost as soon as you docker rm the container.)
I looked through your code and I see you creating the server socket and binding it to a port and listening, but I could not find where you call socket.accept() method ?
I have a nat and it has various server
So from my local server I want to go to nat and then from nat i have to ssh to other machines
Local-->NAT(abcuser#publicIP with key 1)-->server1(xyzuser#localIP with key 2)
nat has different ssh key
and each of the server has different ssh key
how can i accomplish this type of multihop ssh using fabric
I tried using env.roledefs feature but it doesnt seems to be working
also I am not sure how to define two ssh keys.I know we can define a list of keys with env.key_filename but issue is will it check each key with each server?How can I be more specific and match a key with one server only
I have tried using command from my local machine
fab deploy -g 'ec2-user#54.251.151.39' -i '/home/aman/Downloads/aws_oms.pem'
and my script is
from __future__ import with_statement
from fabric.api import local, run, cd, env, execute
env.hosts=['ubuntu#10.0.0.77']
env.key_filename=['/home/ec2-user/varnish_cache.pem']
def deploy():
run("uname -a")
It's possible. Double hop to 10.0.0.2 (and list files) via gateway hop 10.0.0.1. Basically, you simply nest the connections with the gateway parameter.
# coding: utf-8
from fabric import Connection
path = '/'
conn1 = Connection(host='user1#10.0.0.1', connect_kwargs={'password': '***'})
conn2 = Connection(host='user2#10.0.0.2', connect_kwargs={'password': '***'}, gateway=conn1)
result = conn2.run(f'''cd {path} && ls -al''', hide=True)
conn2.close()
conn1.close()
msg = "Ran {0.command!r} on {0.connection.host}, got stdout:\n{0.stdout}"
print(msg.format(result))
Please remember to run the SSH connection manually once to introduce the servers to each other!
Install via
pip3 install --upgrade fabric
pip3 install cryptography==2.4.2 # optional to hide some annoying warnings
http://docs.fabfile.org/en/latest/concepts/networking.html
Python 3.6+.
In order to connect to remote hosts via an intermediate server, you can use the --gateway command-line option :
http://docs.fabfile.org/en/latest/usage/fab.html#cmdoption-g
Or, alternatively, set the env.gateway variable inside your fabfile :
http://docs.fabfile.org/en/latest/usage/env.html#gateway
For more detail information, see:
http://docs.fabfile.org/en/stable/concepts/networking.html#ssh-gateways
A little context is in order for this question: I am making an application that copies files/folders from one machine to another in python. The connection must be able to go through multiple machines. I quite literally have the machines connected in serial so I have to hop through them until I get to the correct one.
Currently, I am using python's subprocess module (Popen). As a very simplistic example I have
import subprocess
# need to set strict host checking to no since we connect to different
# machines over localhost
tunnel_string = "ssh -oStrictHostKeyChecking=no -L9999:127.0.0.1:9999 -ACt machine1 ssh -L9999:127.0.0.1:22 -ACt -N machineN"
proc = subprocess.Popen(tunnel_string.split())
# Do work, copy files etc. over ssh on localhost with port 9999
proc.terminate()
My question:
When doing it like this, I cannot seem to get agent forwarding to work, which is essential in something like this. Is there a way to do this?
I tried using the shell=True keyword in Popen like so
tunnel_string = "eval `ssh-agent` && ssh-add && ssh -oStrictHostKeyChecking=no -L9999:127.0.0.1:9999 -ACt machine1 ssh -L9999:127.0.0.1:22 -ACt -N machineN"
proc = subprocess.Popen(tunnel_string, shell=True)
# etc
The problem with this is that the name of the machines is given by user input, meaning they could easily inject malicious shell code. A second problem is that I then have a new ssh-agent process running every time I make a connection.
I have a nice function in my bashrc which identifies already running ssh-agents and sets the appropriate environment variables and adds my ssh key, but of cource subprocess cannot reference functions defined in my bashrc. I tried setting the executable="/bin/bash" variable with shell=True in Popen to no avail.
You should give Fabric a try.
It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote
shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files,
as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user
for input, or aborting execution.
The program below will give you a test run.
First install fabric with pip install fabric then save the code below in fabfile.py
from fabric.api import *
env.hosts = ['server url/IP'] #change to ur server.
env.user = #username for the server
env.password = #password
def run_interactive():
with settings(warn_only = True)
cmd = 'clear'
while cmd is not 'stop fabric':
run(cmd)
cmd = raw_input('Command to run on server')
Change to the directory containing your fabfile and run fab run_interactive then each command you enter will be run on the server
I tested your first simplistic example and agent forwarding worked. The only think that I can see that might cause problems is that the environment variables SSH_AGENT_PID and SSH_AUTH_SOCK are not set correctly in the shell that you execute your script from. You might use ssh -v to get a better idea of where things are breaking down.
Try setting up a SSH config file: https://linuxize.com/post/using-the-ssh-config-file/
I frequently am required to tunnel through a bastion server and I use a configuration like so in my ~/.ssh/config file. Just change the host and user names. This also presumes that you have entries for these host names in your hosts (/etc/hosts) file.
Host my-bastion-server
Hostname my-bastion-server
User user123
AddKeysToAgent yes
UseKeychain yes
ForwardAgent yes
Host my-target-host
HostName my-target-host
User user123
AddKeysToAgent yes
UseKeychain yes
I then gain access with syntax like:
ssh my-bastion-server -At 'ssh my-target-host -At'
And I issue commands against my-target-host like:
ssh my-bastion-server -AT 'ssh my-target-host -AT "ls -la"'