Use python code to access remote docker servers on Ubuntu20¶

Before writing python code, we need to make sure that our docker servers can be accessed by remote network.

Make docker servers remotely accessible¶

By default, docker on Ubuntu20 is only accessible to the local machine. Take the following steps to make it remotely accessible:

Edit docker systemd config:

# "SYSTEMD_EDITOR=/bin/vi" tells "systemctl edit" to use vi.
# If you don't like vi, removing "SYSTEMD_EDITOR=/bin/vi" is ok.
SYSTEMD_EDITOR=/bin/vi systemctl edit docker.service

Write the following lines in the text input window, then save and exit:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/dockerd -H fd:// -H tcp://0.0.0.0:2375

Restart docker:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart docker.service

Check if you can access docker server by ip:

docker -H tcp://192.168.1.100:2375 ps

Replace "192.168.1.100" with your actual server ip.

Python Side¶

Install python dependency:

pip install docker

Code example:

import docker

# replace "192.168.1.100" with your actual server ip.
client = docker.DockerClient(base_url='tcp://192.168.1.100:2375')
container = client.containers.run("redis", 'redis-server --maxmemory 256mb', ports={
    '6379/tcp': 6379,
}, detach=True)
print(container.id)