Dinghy FAQ

Solutions to many common problems can be found here.

The docker client gives an SSL error or times out

The most common cause is the DOCKER_* environment variables not being set correctly. Check the output of dinghy status from the same terminal window. If it displays a message such as

To connect the Docker client to the Docker daemon, please set:

export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://192.168.99.101:2376

this means your envionment variables aren't correctly set. Of course if dinghy status reports that the VM is stopped, you should run dinghy up as well.

The docker client reports errors like x509: certificate is valid for 192.168.x.y, not 192.168.x.z

Sometimes the IP address of the docker-machine VM changes on restart, which in turn causes the certificates for the VM to not work. Current versions of docker-machine don't handle this for you, and neither does Dinghy, so to fix this you need to regenerate the certificates with:

$ docker-machine regenerate-certs dinghy

Replace dinghy with the VM machine name if you aren't using the default name.

I'm running into file permissions issues on the NFS mounted volumes

Unfortunately, there isn't yet a one-size-fits-all solution for sharing folders from the host OS X machine into the Linux VM and then into the docker containers, and permissions issues are sometimes a problem. This isn't an issue unique to Dinghy, and is a common point of discussion in projects like Docker Machine as well.

Because Dinghy is geared toward development, it optimizes for sharing source code directories between the containers and host, and then uses NFS for performance. This works really well for editing code in OS X and seeing the changes immediately in your running containers, but can cause problems with mounting volumes from the host in some containers that expect files to be owned by certain users, since the files can't be successfully chown'd to the user running in the container.

In practice, this means that it's usually best to run containers such as postgres using a normal docker volume, rather than a host-shared volume. This is the default, so normally nothing needs to be done, but you may run into chown errors or other file permissions issues if you try to mount a host volume into such containers.

For more background on the decisions made here, see the discussion in issues such as https://github.com/codekitchen/dinghy/issues/31 and https://github.com/codekitchen/dinghy/issues/15

In the future this may be solvable using user namespacing, which was introduced in a very limited form in docker 1.10. It would also be possible in theory to modify the NFS server process to do things such as ignore chown commands, but this isn't currently planned.

I can't connect to an app running in docker from another VM (commonly to test in IE)

If you are running the Windows VM in VirtualBox, you can configure it to use the host DNS resolver:

VBoxManage modifyvm "IE11 - Win10" --natdnshostresolver1 on

Replace "IE11 - Win10" with the name of your VM. This will allow the VM to resolve and connect directly to your http://*.docker services running in Dinghy.

I want to make my containers reachable from other machines on my LAN

Your Docker VM is configured to use a host-only network, so it's not accessible outside your computer by default. To enable others to reach your VM, you can use a tool such as my-proxy to set up a proxy server. Please be aware of the security implications of exposing your containers in this way, and don't do it on an untrusted network.

Alternatively, you can use stone (can be installed with brew), which will make a proxy to all exposed Docker ports on Dinghy's IP from localhost:

stone `docker ps -q | grep -v $(docker ps -q --filter='name=dinghy_http_proxy') | xargs -L 1 docker port | grep -o "[0-9]\+$" | tr '\n' ' ' | sed -e "s/\([0-9]\{1,\}\)/$(dinghy ip):\1 \1 --/g"`

The command can be defined as a bash function in ~/.bash_profile for quick usage:

function dinghy-expose {
    binds=`docker ps -q | grep -v $(docker ps -q --filter='name=dinghy_http_proxy') | xargs -L 1 docker port | grep -o "[0-9]\+$" | tr '\n' ' ' | sed -e "s/\([0-9]\{1,\}\)/$(dinghy ip):\1 \1 --/g"`
    eval stone $binds
}

DNS SRV/MX record lookups fail when using VirtualBox

This is an issue with VirtualBox DNS serving, see https://github.com/codekitchen/dinghy/issues/172

There is a workaround there, turning on natdnsproxy1 for the VM, but unfortunately this breaks resolving of *.docker domains from within the VM. So there is no known VirtualBox configuration that fixes all problems.

How can I run X11 apps in Docker and have them display on my Mac?

1. If you haven't already, install the latest version of XQuartz. Reboot your Mac. Logging out and back in is not sufficient.
2. Launch XQuartz, open Preferences->Security, and enable "Allow connections from network clients". This only needs to be done once.
3. On each launch of XQuartz, you will need to enable connections from the Dinghy VM IP address with xhost + $(dinghy ip)
4. Then you can just launch a Docker container setting -e DISPLAY=$(dinghy ip --host):0 and any X11 applications run in the container should display on the host.

For instance, here is how to run firefox:

$ open -a XQuartz
$ xhost + $(dinghy ip)
$ docker run --rm -e DISPLAY=$(dinghy ip --host):0 jess/firefox

Please make sure you understand the risks of allowing X11 applications to run. Do not run untrusted X11 containers.