How to ping Docker container from another container by name?

Better Stack Team
Updated on February 17, 2023

The feather of accessing or pinging containers from other containers using their name rather than their IP address comes out of the box with docker networks.

For this, you will need two (or more) containers. It is very important to explicitly specify their name using the --name flag. For example:

 
docker run -d --name container1  -p 8001:80 eboraas/apache-php
docker run -d --name container2  -p 8001:80 eboraas/apache-php

Then, you need to create a network:

 
docker network create mynetwork

Lastly, connect the containers to the newly created network:

 
docker network connect mynetwork container1
docker network connect mynetwork container2

Now the setup is complete, you can ping from one container in the network to another:

 
docker exec -ti container1 ping container2

If you are new to Docker, feel free to start with our Getting started logging guide.

To learn more about ping monitoring go to our intro guide or check out the list of best tools to use.

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