How to ssh into the services create using docker-compose

Question

This is my docker compose file

version: '2'

# based off compose-sample-2, only we build nginx.conf into image
# uses sample site from https://startbootstrap.com/template-overviews/agency/

services:
  proxy:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: nginx.Dockerfile
    ports:
      - '80:80'
  web:
    image: httpd
    volumes:
      - ./html:/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/

Now can I ssh into any of the services which gets creats when I run docker-compose up

Answer 1

The standard mechanism is not to ssh into containers, but to connect to a container using docker exec. Given a container Id like 3cdb7385c127 you can connect (aka ssh into it) with

docker exec -it 3cdb7385c127 sh

or for a full login shell if you have bash available in container

docker exec -it 3cdb7385c127 bash -l

You can still ssh into a container if you want to, but you would need to have a ssh server installed, configured and running and you would need to have access to the container IP from outside or redirect container's :22 onto some port on the host.

Answer 2

1. do 'docker ps' to get the names and docker id for your container.
2. do 'docker exec -it <docker_id> /bin/bash'

this will give you bash prompt inside container.

Answer 3

The easiest way is to run the docker-compose exec command:

docker-compose exec web /bin/bash

with the latest version of docker, since "Docker Compose is now in the Docker CLI", you can do:

docker compose exec web /bin/bash

If you do want to use the pure docker command, you can do:

web=`docker container ls |grep web |awk '{print \$1}'`
docker container exec -it $web /bin/bash

or in a single line:

docker container exec -it `docker container ls |grep web |awk '{print \$1}'` /bin/bash

in which we find the container id first, then run the familiar docker container exec -it command.

As it is mentioned in the question, the service containers have been created by running docker-compose up. Therefore I don't think docker-compose run is appropriate answer, since it will start a container in my test.