Windows – use named pipes inside containers

dockernamed-pipeswindowswindows-10

I am trying to use named pipes for inter-process communication inside a docker container but am getting "not found" errors when trying to read/write. Does docker for windows support named pipes? The software's been released and I know it works fine in VMs. I just can't find anything saying yes or no that containers on windows support named pipes.

I've got an IIS application with a named pipe binding installed inside the container along with a client application also inside the container trying to communicate via net.pipe://localhost. My run command looks like this

docker run -it -m 2GB -p 80:80 --network External company/appserver

The error message is

The pipe endpoint 'net.pipe://localhost/WCFSvc/WCF.svc' could not be
found on your local machine

Best Solution

You can mount named pipes into Docker containers, but this only works on Windows Server 1709 and later. I put an example in my blog post: https://blog.docker.com/2017/09/docker-windows-server-1709/

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -v \\.\pipe\docker_engine:\\.\pipe\docker_engine friism/jenkins

New answer, powershell

TCP

Get-Process -Id (Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort YourPortNumberHere).OwningProcess

UDP

Get-Process -Id (Get-NetUDPEndpoint -LocalPort YourPortNumberHere).OwningProcess

Old answer, cmd

 C:\> netstat -a -b

(Add -n to stop it trying to resolve hostnames, which will make it a lot faster.)

Note Dane's recommendation for TCPView. It looks very useful!

-a Displays all connections and listening ports.

-b Displays the executable involved in creating each connection or listening port. In some cases well-known executables host multiple independent components, and in these cases the sequence of components involved in creating the connection or listening port is displayed. In this case the executable name is in [] at the bottom, on top is the component it called, and so forth until TCP/IP was reached. Note that this option can be time-consuming and will fail unless you have sufficient permissions.

-n Displays addresses and port numbers in numerical form.

-o Displays the owning process ID associated with each connection.

Wcf – Prevent Named Pipes Conflict

You can use multiple named pipes at a time. Take a look at Juval Lowy's ServiceModelEx from his book Programming WCF Services. You will see when he creates named pipes, he uses code that looks something like:

Uri baseAddress = new Uri("net.pipe://localhost/" + Guid.NewGuid().ToString());

Which should avoid name conflicts.

Best Solution

Related Solutions

Windows – How to you find out which process is listening on a TCP or UDP port on Windows

New answer, powershell

TCP

UDP

Old answer, cmd

Wcf – Prevent Named Pipes Conflict

Related Question