The days of kludgy hacks for IPv6-connected docker containers are over. A recent PR merged native IPv6 functionality into the docker daemon. The new bits have not yet made it into the docker ppa package as of 1/17/2015. Therefore, some assembly is required.
You’ll need to compile docker from source. The only currently supported docker build process uses docker. Does this remind anyone of the movie Inception?
Here’s an installation process you can use on a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 VM.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get -y install git build-essential docker.io git clone https://github.com/docker/docker.git cd docker sudo make build sudo make binary sudo service docker.io stop sudo ip link set docker0 down sudo ip link delete docker0 VERSION=1.4.1 # version as of this writing sudo cp ./bundles/$VERSION-dev/binary/docker-$VERSION-dev $(which docker) sudo echo "DOCKER_OPTS='--ipv6 --fixed-cidr-v6=\"2001:DB8::/64\"'" >> /etc/default/docker.io service docker.io start
Docker does not put an address within the /64 on the docker0 bridge. It uses fe80::1/64. The default route in the container is set to this link local address.
Your containers will not be able to communicate with the IPv6 internet unless the /64 you’ve selected is routed to the docker host. Unlike how docker handles IPv4 in containers, there is no NAT. Use a provider that will route the /64 to your docker host. Linode did this for me after I emailed the request to its support team. Using providers such as DigitalOcean that support IPv6 but do not route a /64 to your VM are not positioned to offer IPv6 connectivity to containers. You’ll have to use the Neighbor Discovery hack that I described in another post.
I’m not sure why docker doesn’t have an option to connect containers directly to a bridge that includes the internet-facing port. Doing this with LXC is easy to accomplish. I suspect this can be done with docker. I don’t know how though. Perhaps someone with more more knowledge of docker can explain how to attach the daemon to a bridge with the LAN interface.
I’ll note that the docker build environment appears to have a bug with name resolution in the build container if IPv6 DNS servers are in /etc/resolv.conf. I didn’t want to invest the time to troubleshoot it. You can comment out the IPv6 DNS servers in the docker host’s /etc/resolv.conf file to avoid the defect.
If you run into problems, let me know in the comments.
