Linking Containers via Docker Remote API

Question

I'm trying to link a child mongo container to a parent node container using the Docker remote API v1.7.

I see the Links property in HostConfig which I'm guessing is passed to the
POST /containers/<id>/start request like

{
  "Links": ["<container-name>:<alias>", ...]
}

I don't see how to name the mongo container to use when starting the node container. Is there an API analogy to the CLI -name flag for docker run?

Do I need to make a separate GET /containers/<id>/json request and live with the auto-generated name?

Answer 1

In the current (1.8) API, the -name flag is passed as a query string to POST /v1.8/containers/create – i.e. like this:

POST /v1.8/containers/create?name=redis_ambassador

(POST body left out for brevity)

I figured this out by using Geoffrey Bachelet's excellent suggestion of using socat as a proxy for all of my docker CLI commands using the following commands:

# on one terminal  
sudo socat -t100 -v UNIX-LISTEN:/tmp/proxysocket.sock,mode=777,reuseaddr,fork UNIX-CONNECT:/var/run/docker.sock

# on a second terminal  
export DOCKER_HOST="unix:///tmp/proxysocket.sock"  

Subsequent docker cli commands will be proxied through socat and their CLI calls will be displayed on the other terminal