Docker Hostmanager

Updates automatically your hosts file (Mac / Linux: /etc/hosts - Windows: c:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts) for example for local development.

This Hostmanager works a bit different than existing docker Hostmanagers. This Hostmanager does not check running containers and tries to find their hostnames. Rather you just tell this Hostmanager directly in the docker-run-command or in the .env file or in the docker-compose.yml file which hosts you need.

Dockerized version of https://github.com/smtxdev/hostmanager.

Supported platforms/environments

• Docker Toolbox (Mac and Windows)
• Docker Desktop for Windows
• Docker Desktop for Mac
• Docker CE (Linux)

Installation

Make sure you have docker installed on your system. See this guide how to install docker on your system. That guide describes as well how to setup docker that it get's access to c:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts and /etc/hosts.

Here very brief the needed steps. See that guide above for more details:

• Install docker
• Mac/Linux: chmod 666 /etc/hosts - Windows: Right click on c:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts and set the file permissions of your current user to full-access. Or in powershell: icacls "c:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc/hosts" /grant Users:F that gives all users on the computer write access to that file.
• Docker-Toolbox: Add the following shared folders /etc (Mac/Linux) and c:/Windows (Windows) in Virtualbox.

Usage via docker run

docker run -v /:/host/ smtxdev/hostmanager --hostnames example1.de,example2.de

Usage via docker-compose

  hostmanager:
    image: smtxdev/hostmanager
    restart: "no"
    environment:
      HOSTMANAGER_HOSTNAMES: "example1.de,example2.de"
    volumes:
      - /:/host/

If you already have an .env file next to your docker-compose.yml then you can do this as well:

  hostmanager:
    image: smtxdev/hostmanager
    restart: "no"
    volumes:
      - ${HOSTMACHINE_MAIN_DRIVE_ROOT}:/host/
      - ./.env:/.env

In your .env file:

HOSTMANAGER_HOSTNAMES: "example1.de,example2.de"

# Use for Windows = /c/ and for Mac/Linux = /
HOSTMACHINE_MAIN_DRIVE_ROOT=/

As you can see we mount the .env file into the container then we don't need to set the env-vars in the docker-compose.yml.

Parameters (environment variables)

All parameters of https://github.com/smtxdev/hostmanager can be passed to the docker-run-command. Alternatively you can set all parameters as env-vars in your .env file or docker-compose.yml file.

See for all parameters:

docker run smtxdev/hostmanager --help