How to know if a service container is ready for connections? - service

I frequently run into this issue creating stacks in Docker. Say I have a LAMP stack in docker-compose.yml:
db:
image: mysql
environment:
MYSQL_VARIOUS: things
web:
build: .
links:
- db
ports:
- "80"
entrypoint:
- setup-and-start
And the setup-and-start script looks like this:
wait_for_mysql && initialize
If the web container has mysql-client installed on it, then I can easily define wait_for_mysql:
wait_for_mysql() {
local timeout=10
while sleep 1; do
mysql [credentials] -e 'select 1;' && return 0
(( --timeout <= 0 )) && break
done
echo 'Failed to initialize mysql within time limit.' >&2
return 1
}
But many containers won't have the client. Rather than install it into every lightweight container, is there a reasonable way I can check if mysql is up and running before initializing my application? It should work on most Docker containers, but doesn't have to be a perfect validation of mysql; even checking for an expected telnet response would probably be acceptable (except that telnet is also not commonly on docker images).

The question is covered in the Docker Compose FAQ. Short answer there is no good way, and this is by design. Though this use case is very common in testing and small applications for any significant system wait for startup is an anti-pattern.
The problem of waiting for a database to be ready is really just a
subset of a much larger problem of distributed systems. In production,
your database could become unavailable or move hosts at any time. The
application needs to be resilient to these types of failures.

Related

How to use an init container to check if MySQL is ready for connections?

Friends, I am learning here and trying to implement an init container which checks if MySQL is ready for connections. I have a pod running MySQL and another pod with an app which will connect to the MysSQL pod when its ready.
No success so far. The error I am getting is the following: sh: mysql: not found. This is how I am trying:
initContainers:
- name: {{ .Values.initContainers.name }}
image: {{ .Values.initContainers.image }}
command:
- "sh"
- "-c"
- "until mysql --host=mysql.default.svc.cluster.local --user={MYSQL_USER}
--password={MYSQL_PASSWORD} --execute=\"SELECT 1;\"; do echo waiting for mysql; sleep 2; done;"
Any idea how I could make this work?
Please try using this.
initContainers:
- name: init-cont
image: busybox:1.31
command: ['sh', '-c', 'echo -e "Checking for the availability of MySQL Server deployment"; while ! nc -z mysql 3306; do sleep 1; printf "-"; done; echo -e " >> MySQL DB Server has started";']
Do absolutely nothing; even delete the initContainers: you have now.
Let's say your application starts up before the database is ready. It tries to connect, fails, and exits. Kubernetes notices this, so it will try to start the application again; if it fails repeatedly, it will start waiting progressively longer between retries (you will see CrashLoopBackOff state). Eventually the cluster will have waited long enough that the database is ready, and the next retry will be successful.
Note that this is probably the same thing that will happen if the database restarts after the application is already running; "at startup time" doesn't need to be a special case.
Your initContainer is missing the mysql client binary.
There are a few ways to solve this:
Use an official mysql docker image, and use what you have as the command.
Create your own docker image from a base image (e.g. Alpine), install mysql-client, and then modify your initContainer to work with Alpine.
Assuming Alpine is your base image you would have a dockerfile like this:
FROM alpine:3.14
RUN apk add mysql-client
Then your initContainer command would be:
command:
- "/bin/ash"
- "-c"
- "until mysql --host=mysql.default.svc.cluster.local --user={MYSQL_USER}
--password={MYSQL_PASSWORD} --execute=\"SELECT 1;\"; do echo waiting for mysql; sleep 2; done;"
My recommendation, use the official mysql docker image
make sure you have installed mysql in your init container . it's seems like you haven't install mysql in your init container. as you are trying to connect as a client from another container rather than mysql. you also need mysql installed in your init container. you can use a mysql image or just install mysql in your container when you are building your docker file of init container.

How to safely stop/start my postgres server when using docker-compose

I sometimes stop/start docker very often when I am release new features in my application.
docker-compose up -d
docker-compose stop
I am using pretty much the bare bones postgres docker setup (see below).
I am mapping the /data folder to my host.
Is there anything I should be worried about if I stop/start docker many times in a day in terms of data getting corrupted?
Is calling docker-compose stop the best way to be stopping my postgres instance?
My postgres service in my docker-compose looks like this:
db:
image: postgres:9.4
volumes:
- "/home/deploy/data/pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data"
restart: always
This setup currently is running smoothly in development, but once it goes to production I want to make sure I am following best practices etc.
Use,
docker-compose down -v
What it does is basically removes all the volumes you added. If you don't those volumes will hang on and eat up your space. It only removes the volume inside the docker container. The volume in your host stays and survives container removal in case if you want that data to survive container removal.
Whenever you create a docker container by docker run, Docker creates a volume/ directory to keep the details about the containers. After you execute docker run, if you look into /var/lib/docker/containers, you will see one directory for each container you started. If you have not removed the volumes for previous container, you will see many directories under the "container" directory. The name of these directories will be very long random letters and number. So, if you don't tell the docker to remove these directories when you stop the container, it will be there forever. The v option I mentioned above, will delete these directories when you take down the container.
Keep in mind, you can view the contents of the directory /var/lib/docker only as a root user. To change to root user, use sudo -i before you attempt to view the contents of the directory.
Databases in particular are usually designed so that it's very hard to lose data, even if the machine loses power in the middle of writing something to disk. (This comes at some performance cost.) So long as you don't have more than one PostgreSQL instance at a time using the same backing data store, I'd expect it to not lose data or otherwise corrupt itself; the worst you should expect to see is a message at startup that it's recovering from a write-ahead log or something along those lines.
docker stop will send a signal to a container that prompts it to shut down cleanly, and PostgreSQL will take this as a cue to shut down. It looks like docker-compose stop, docker-compose down, and sending ^C to docker-compose up all use the same mechanism. So the way you're doing it now should result in a clean shutdown (provided PostgreSQL finishes its cleanup within 10 seconds).
I believe you can docker-compose restart specific services, or docker-compose up --force-recreate them. This would help if you rebuilt your application container and needed to restart that, but not its database.

Connect to a mongoDB session from within container

I'm new to learning how to use goLang to build microservices. I had a whole project up and running locally, but when I tried deploying it I ran into a problem. The session I was working with (mgo.Dial("localhost")) was no longer working. When I put this into a docker image, it failed to connect to the local host, which makes sense, since the docker image builds it over a new OS (alpine in my case). I was wondering what I should do to get it to connect.
To be clear, when I was researching this, most people wanted to connect to a mongoDB session that is a docker container, I want to connect to a mongoDB session from within a docker container. Also once I'm ready for deployment I'll be using StatefulSet with kubernetes if that changes anything.
For example, this is what I want my program to be like:
sess, err := mgo.Dial("localhost") //or whatever
if err != nil {
fmt.Println("failed to connect")
else {
fmt.Println("connected")
What I tried doing:
Dockerfile:
FROM alpine:3.6
COPY /build/app /bin/
EXPOSE 8080
ENTRYPOINT ["/bin/app"]
In terminal:
docker build -t hell:4 .
docker run -d -p 8080:8080 hell:4
And as you can expect, it says not connected. Also the port mapping is for the rest of the project, not this part.
Thanks for your help!
I think you should not try to connect to the MongoDB server running on your machine. Think about deploying the whole application lateron you want a MongoDB server running together with your service on some cloud or server.
That problem could be solved by setting up an additional container and link it to your Go Web App. Docker compose can handle this. Just place a docker-compose.yml file in the directory you are executing your docker build in.
version: '3'
services:
myapp:
build: .
image: hell:4
ports:
- 8080:8080
links:
- mongodb
depends_on:
- mongodb
mongodb:
image: mongo:latest
ports:
- "27017:27017"
environment:
- MONGODB_USER="user"
- MONGODB_PASS="pass"
Something like this should do it (not tested). You have two services: One for your app that gets build according to your Dockerfile in the directory in which you currently are. Additionally it links to a service called mongodb defined below. The mongodb service is accessible via the service name mongodb.
If your mongoDB server is running in your host machine, replace localhost by you host IP.

Is using non external volume a good way to persist data in dockerized postgres

After reading
How to persist data in a dockerized postgres database using volumes
I know mount a volume to local host folder, is a good way to prevent data loss, in case fatal happens in docker process.
I'm using Windows as host and Linux based docker image. Windows is having problem to mount postgres data (Linux based docker image) to Windows host directory - Mount Postgres data to Windows host directory
Later, I discover another technique
postgres:
build:
context: ./postgres
dockerfile: Dockerfile
restart: always
ports:
- "5432:5432"
volumes:
- postgres_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data
volumes:
postgres_data: {}
I can use a non external volume (I have no idea what is that yet)
After implement such, I try to perform
docker-compose down
docker-compose up
The data is still there.
May I know,
Is this still a good way to persist data in dockerized postgres?
Where exactly data is being stored? Is it some hidden directory in host machine?
Is this still a good way to persist data in dockerized postgres?
no but olso yes ....postgres is DB so data should be externalized to avoid data-loss in case of connection failure to the container etc...
But a good practice would be to have 2 DB 1 on containers 1 on host or in 2 containers (then with data inside containers) in master/slave mode synchro to have high availability for container maintenance for example but this is high availability only not backup ! :) if it doesn't exist you have to create it of course :-)
Where exactly data is being stored? Is it some hidden directory in
host machine?
No it is where you share the /var/lib/postgres so in your example in a directory called postgres_data on host
(use full path is a good practice & then you saw/guess by yourself where it was define in your file) :)

How can I wait for a docker container to be up and running?

When running a service inside a container, let's say mongodb, the command
docker run -d myimage
will exit instantly, and return the container id.
In my CI script, I run a client to test mongodb connection, right after running the mongo container.
The problem is: the client can't connect because the service is not up yet.
Apart from adding a big sleep 10in my script, I don't see any option to wait for a container to be up and running.
Docker has a command wait which doesn't work in that case, because the container doesn't exist.
Is it a limitation of docker?
Found this simple solution, been looking for something better but no luck...
until [ "`docker inspect -f {{.State.Running}} CONTAINERNAME`"=="true" ]; do
sleep 0.1;
done;
or if you want to wait until the container is reporting as healthy (assuming you have a healthcheck)
until [ "`docker inspect -f {{.State.Health.Status}} CONTAINERNAME`"=="healthy" ]; do
sleep 0.1;
done;
As commented in a similar issue for docker 1.12
HEALTHCHECK support is merged upstream as per docker/docker#23218 - this can be considered to determine when a container is healthy prior to starting the next in the order
This is available since docker 1.12rc3 (2016-07-14)
docker-compose is in the process of supporting a functionality to wait for specific conditions.
It uses libcompose (so I don't have to rebuild the docker interaction) and adds a bunch of config commands for this. Check it out here: https://github.com/dansteen/controlled-compose
You can use it in Dockerfile like this:
HEALTHCHECK --interval=5m --timeout=3s \
CMD curl -f http://localhost/ || exit 1
Official docs: https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/builder/#/healthcheck
If you don't want to expose the ports, as is the case if you plan to link the container and might be running multiple instances for testing, then I found this was a good way to do it in one line :) This example is based on waiting for ElasticSearch to be ready:
docker inspect --format '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}:9200' elasticsearch | xargs wget --retry-connrefused --tries=5 -q --wait=3 --spider
This requires wget to be available, which is standard on Ubuntu. It will retry 5 times, 3 seconds between tries, even if the connection is refused, and also does not download anything.
If the containerized service you started doesn't necessarily respond well to curl or wget requests (which is quite likely for many services) then you could use nc instead.
Here's a snippet from a host script which starts a Postgres container and waits for it to be available before continuing:
POSTGRES_CONTAINER=`docker run -d --name postgres postgres:9.3`
# Wait for the postgres port to be available
until nc -z $(sudo docker inspect --format='{{.NetworkSettings.IPAddress}}' $POSTGRES_CONTAINER) 5432
do
echo "waiting for postgres container..."
sleep 0.5
done
Edit - This example does not require that you EXPOSE the port you are testing, since it accesses the Docker-assigned 'private' IP address for the container. However this only works if the docker host daemon is listening on the loopback (127.x.x.x). If (for example) you are on a Mac and running the boot2docker VM, you will be unable to use this method since you cannot route to the 'private' IP addresses of the containers from your Mac shell.
Assuming that you know the host+port of your MongoDB server (either because you used a -link, or because you injected them with -e), you can just use curl to check if the MongoDB server is running and accepting connections.
The following snippet will try to connect every second, until it succeeeds:
#!/bin/sh
while ! curl http://$DB_PORT_27017_TCP_ADDR:$DB_PORT_27017_TCP_PORT/
do
echo "$(date) - still trying"
sleep 1
done
echo "$(date) - connected successfully"
I've ended up with something like:
#!/bin/bash
attempt=0
while [ $attempt -le 59 ]; do
attempt=$(( $attempt + 1 ))
echo "Waiting for server to be up (attempt: $attempt)..."
result=$(docker logs mongo)
if grep -q 'waiting for connections on port 27017' <<< $result ; then
echo "Mongodb is up!"
break
fi
sleep 2
done
Throwing my own solution out there:
I'm using docker networks so Mark's netcat trick didn't work for me (no access from the host network), and Erik's idea doesn't work for a postgres container (the container is marked as running even though postgres isn't yet available to connect to). So I'm just attempting to connect to postgres via an ephemeral container in a loop:
#!/bin/bash
docker network create my-network
docker run -d \
--name postgres \
--net my-network \
-e POSTGRES_USER=myuser \
postgres
# wait for the database to come up
until docker run --rm --net my-network postgres psql -h postgres -U myuser; do
echo "Waiting for postgres container..."
sleep 0.5
done
# do stuff with the database...
If you want to wait for an opened port, you can use this simple script:
until </dev/tcp/localhost/32022; do sleep 1; done
For wait until port 32022 be able to connect.
I had to tackle this recetly and came up with an idea. When doing research for this task I got here, so I thought I'd share my solution with future visitors of this post.
Docker-compose-based solution
If you are using docker-compose you can check out my docker synchronization POC. I combined some of the ideas in other questions (thanks for that - upvoted).
The basic idea is that every container in the composite exposes a diagnostic service. Calling this service checks if the required set of ports is open in the container and returns the overall status of the container (WARMUP/RUNNING as per the POC). Each container also has an utility to check upon startup if the dependant services are up and running. Only then the container starts up.
In the example docker-compose environment there are two services server1 and server2 and the client service which waits for both servers to start then sends a request to both of them and exits.
Excerpt from the POC
wait_for_server.sh
#!/bin/bash
server_host=$1
sleep_seconds=5
while true; do
echo -n "Checking $server_host status... "
output=$(echo "" | nc $server_host 7070)
if [ "$output" == "RUNNING" ]
then
echo "$server_host is running and ready to process requests."
break
fi
echo "$server_host is warming up. Trying again in $sleep_seconds seconds..."
sleep $sleep_seconds
done
Waiting for multiple containers:
trap 'kill $(jobs -p)' EXIT
for server in $DEPENDS_ON
do
/assets/wait_for_server.sh $server &
wait $!
done
Diagnostic srervice basic implementation (checkports.sh):
#!/bin/bash
for port in $SERVER_PORT; do
nc -z localhost $port;
rc=$?
if [[ $rc != 0 ]]; then
echo "WARMUP";
exit;
fi
done
echo "RUNNING";
Wiring up the diagnostic service to a port:
nc -v -lk -p 7070 -e /assets/checkports.sh
test/test_runner
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
$stdout.sync = true
def wait_ready(port)
until (`netstat -ant | grep #{port}`; $?.success?) do
sleep 1
print '.'
end
end
print 'Running supervisord'
system '/usr/bin/supervisord'
wait_ready(3000)
puts "It's ready :)"
$ docker run -v /tmp/mnt:/mnt myimage ruby mnt/test/test_runner
I'm testing like this whether the port is listening or not.
In this case I have test running from inside container, but it's also possible from outside whether mongodb is ready or not.
$ docker run -p 37017:27017 -d myimage
And check whether the port 37017 is listening or not from host container.
You can use wait-for-it, "a pure bash script that will wait on the availability of a host and TCP port. It is useful for synchronizing the spin-up of interdependent services, such as linked docker containers. Since it is a pure bash script, it does not have any external dependencies".
However, you should try to design your services to avoid these kind of interdependencies between services. Can your service try to reconnect to the database? Can you let your container just die if it can't connect to the database and let a container orchestrator (e.g. Docker Swarm) do it for you?
Docker-compose solution
After docker-compose I dont know name of docker container, so I use
docker inspect -f {{.State.Running}} $(docker-compose ps -q <CONTAINER_NAME>)
and checking true like here https://stackoverflow.com/a/33520390/7438079
In order to verify if a PostgreSQL or MySQL (currently) Docker container is up and running (specially for migration tools like Flyway), you can use the wait-for binary: https://github.com/arcanjoaq/wait-for.
For mongoDB docker instance we did this and works like a charm:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
until docker exec -i ${MONGO_IMAGE_NAME} mongo -u ${MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_USERNAME} -p ${MONGO_INITDB_ROOT_PASSWORD}<<EOF
exit
EOF
do
echo "Waiting for Mongo to start..."
sleep 0.5
done
Here is what I ended up with which is similar to a previous answer just a little more concise,
until [[ $(docker logs $db_container_name) == *"waiting for connections on port 27017"* ]]
do
echo "waiting on mongo to boot..."
sleep 1
done
1 : A container attached to a service with docker-compose doesn't launch when a Synology NAS starts up.
I had a problem launching a docker container on a Synology NAS that was attached to another container via docker-compose like this:
...
---
version: "3"
services:
gluetun:
image: qmcgaw/gluetun
container_name: gluetun
...
qbittorrent:
image: lscr.io/linuxserver/qbittorrent:latest
container_name: qbittorrent
# Connect the service to gluetun
network_mode: "service:gluetun"
...
The docker used by Synology is different or not up to date and apparently does not appreciate that a container is attached to another container with network_mode, the Synology docker considers that the container is not attached to any network and therefore can not launch the container. However in command line it works very well so I wanted to make a script to launch it automatically at the startup of my NAS by a scheduled task.
note : I creat my docker compose with portainer
2 : The until loop does not work even with all the different ways of writing the condition.
If like me on your Synology NAS you did not manage to make the until loop work as described superhero : here you will have to go through the while loop.
however with the -x argument of bash to debug my code the String comparison was well done:
output line (same with all ways of describing the expression):
...
+ [' false = true ']'
...
No matter what the result, nothing worked, I checked every time and there was always a moment when it did not work as I wanted.
4: THE SOLUTION FOR SYNOLOGY
Environment
DSM : 7.1.1
bash : 4.4.23
docker : 20.10.3
After finding the right syntax, we had to solve another following problem:
The docker container status check can only work if the synology docker package is running.
so i used synopkg with is_onoff, is_active doesn't work and status was giving too much string. so my solution gave this :
#!/bin/bash
while [ "$(synopkg is_onoff Docker)" != "package Docker is turned on" ]; do
sleep 0.1;
done;
echo "Docker package is running..."
echo ""
while [ "$(docker inspect -f {{.State.Running}} gluetun)" = "false" ]; do
sleep 0.1;
done;
echo "gluetun is running..."
echo ""
if [ "$(docker ps -a -f status=exited -f name=qbittorrent --format '{{.Names}}')" ]; then
echo "Qbittorrent is not running I try to start this container"
docker start qbittorrent
else
echo "Qbittorrent docker is already started"
fi
So I was able to do a scheduled task with the root user at Boot-Up in the DSM configurations and it worked fine after a reboot, without checking the Synology Docker package launch status with synopkg it did not work.
NOTE
I think the version of Bash in DSM doesn't like the until loop or it is misinterpreted. Maybe this solution can work with systems where bash is in an older version and for X reasons you can't update it or you don't want to update the binaries of Bash to avoid breaking your system.