Docker: any way to list open sockets inside a runn

Question

I would like to execute netstat inside a running docker container to see open TCP sockets and their statuses. But, on some of my docker containers, netstat is not available. Is there any way to get open sockets (and their statuses, and which IP addresses they are connected to if any) without using netstat, via some docker API? (BTW, my container uses docker-proxy - that is, not directly bridged)

I guess I could look at /proc file system directly, but at that point, I might as well docker cp netstat into the container and execute it. I was wondering if there was any facility that docker might provide for this.

Answer 1

You can use the nsenter command to run a command on your host inside the network namespace of the Docker container. Just get the PID of your Docker container:

docker inspect -f '{{.State.Pid}}' container_name_or_id

For example, on my system:

$ docker inspect -f '{{.State.Pid}}' c70b53d98466
15652

And once you have the PID, use that as the argument to the target (-t) option of nsenter. For example, to run netstat inside the container network namespace:

$ sudo nsenter -t 15652 -n netstat
Active Internet connections (only servers)
Proto Recv-Q Send-Q Local Address           Foreign Address         State      
tcp        0      0 0.0.0.0:80              0.0.0.0:*               LISTEN     

Notice that this worked even though the container does not have netstat installed:

$ docker exec -it c70b53d98466 netstat
rpc error: code = 13 desc = invalid header field value "oci runtime error: exec failed: container_linux.go:247: starting container process caused \"exec: \\\"netstat\\\": executable file not found in $PATH\"\n"

(nsenter is part of the util-linux package)

Answer 2

The two commands from @larsks answer merged into one-liner - no need to copy-paste the PID(s) (just replace container_name_or_id):

sudo nsenter -t $(docker inspect -f '{{.State.Pid}}' container_name_or_id) -n netstat