How to get IP address of running docker container

Question

If you don't want to map ports from your host to the container you can access directly to the docker range ip for the container. This range is by default only accessed from your host. You can check your container network data doing:

docker inspect <containerNameOrId>

Probably is better to filter:

docker inspect <containerNameOrId> | grep '"IPAddress"' | head -n 1

Usually, the default docker ip range is 172.17.0.0/16. Your host should be 172.17.0.1 and your first container should be 172.17.0.2 if everything is normal and you didn't specify any special network options.

EDIT Another more elegant way using docker features instead of "bash tricking":

docker inspect -f "{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}" <containerNameOrId>

EDIT2 For modern docker engines, now it is this way (thanks to the commenters!):

docker inspect -f '{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}' <containerNameOrId>

Use --format option to get only the IP address instead whole container info:

sudo docker inspect --format '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}' <CONTAINER ID>

For modern docker engines use this command :

docker inspect -f '{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}' container_name_or_id

and for older engines use :

docker inspect --format '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}' container_name_or_id

if you want to obtain it right within the container, you can try

ip a | grep -oE "\b([0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}\b" | grep 172.17