Can I run multiple programs in a Docker container?

Question

There can be only one ENTRYPOINT, but that target is usually a script that launches as many programs that are needed. You can additionally use for example Supervisord or similar to take care of launching multiple services inside single container. This is an example of a docker container running mysql, apache and wordpress within a single container.

Say, You have one database that is used by a single web application. Then it is probably easier to run both in a single container.

If You have a shared database that is used by more than one application, then it would be better to run the database in its own container and the applications each in their own containers.

There are at least two possibilities how the applications can communicate with each other when they are running in different containers:

1. Use exposed IP ports and connect via them.
2. Recent docker versions support linking.

I had similar requirement of running a LAMP stack, Mongo DB and my own services

Docker is OS based virtualisation, which is why it isolates its container around a running process, hence it requires least one process running in FOREGROUND.

So you provide your own startup script as the entry point, thus your startup script becomes an extended Docker image script, in which you can stack any number of the services as far as AT LEAST ONE FOREGROUND SERVICE IS STARTED, WHICH TOO TOWARDS THE END

So my Docker image file has two line below in the very end:

COPY myStartupScript.sh /usr/local/myscripts/myStartupScript.sh
CMD ["/bin/bash", "/usr/local/myscripts/myStartupScript.sh"]

In my script I run all MySQL, MongoDB, Tomcat etc. In the end I run my Apache as a foreground thread.

source /etc/apache2/envvars
/usr/sbin/apache2 -DFOREGROUND

This enables me to start all my services and keep the container alive with the last service started being in the foreground

Hope it helps

UPDATE: Since I last answered this question, new things have come up like Docker compose, which can help you run each service on its own container, yet bind all of them together as dependencies among those services, try knowing more about docker-compose and use it, it is more elegant way unless your need does not match with it.

I strongly disagree with some previous solutions that recommended to run both services in the same container. It's clearly stated in the documentation that it's not a recommended:

It is generally recommended that you separate areas of concern by using one service per container. That service may fork into multiple processes (for example, Apache web server starts multiple worker processes). It’s ok to have multiple processes, but to get the most benefit out of Docker, avoid one container being responsible for multiple aspects of your overall application. You can connect multiple containers using user-defined networks and shared volumes.

There are good use cases for supervisord or similar programs but running a web application + database is not part of them.

You should definitely use docker-compose to do that and orchestrate multiple containers with different responsibilities.

Although it's not recommended you can run 2 processes in foreground by using wait. Just make a bash script with the following content. Eg start.sh:

# runs 2 commands simultaneously:

mongod & # your first application
P1=$!
python script.py & # your second application
P2=$!
wait $P1 $P2

In your Dockerfile, start it with

CMD bash start.sh

I would recommend to set up a local Kubernetes cluster if you want to run multiple processes simultaneously. You can 'distribute' the app by providing them a simple Kubernetes manifest.

They can be in separate containers, and indeed, if the application was also intended to run in a larger environment, they probably would be.

A multi-container system would require some more orchestration to be able to bring up all the required dependencies, though in Docker v0.6.5+, there is a new facility to help with that built into Docker itself - Linking. With a multi-machine solution, its still something that has to be arranged from outside the Docker environment however.

With two different containers, the two parts still communicate over TCP/IP, but unless the ports have been locked down specifically (not recommended, as you'd be unable to run more than one copy), you would have to pass the new port that the database has been exposed as to the application, so that it could communicate with Mongo. This is again, something that Linking can help with.

For a simpler, small installation, where all the dependencies are going in the same container, having both the database and Python runtime started by the program that is initially called as the ENTRYPOINT is also possible. This can be as simple as a shell script, or some other process controller - Supervisord is quite popular, and a number of examples exist in the public Dockerfiles.