Hacker News Reader

Comment by chaps | Hacker News Reader

You're being really generous to the documentation at Docker. It stinks and doesn't make it clear that it punches a hole in your firewall.

Neither the compose quickstart [1], nor the compose specification [2] mention anything about iptables nor firewalls. The compose specification adds more details than the quickstart, but... it's obtuse, and overall a 12,000 word document! Surely that incredibly important information that has demonstrably and unexpectedly led to external access should be contained in either of these documents! Surely you can agree that their documentation should contain either the word "iptables" or "firewall"?!

[1] https://docs.docker.com/compose/gettingstarted/ [2] https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/

View on HN

They have an absurd amount of detail, you just have to bother to actually read. Linked directly from the overview, after explaining why it’s not on the platform-independent explain, is exactly what you asked for.

Tl;dr - If you need to add rules which load before Docker’s rules, add them to the DOCKER-USER chain.

https://docs.docker.com/network/iptables/

All I'm saying is they can do a better job presenting the information so these things are more readily findable. People are calling this a footgun for a reason. And no, that link isn't mentioned in the docker overview page[1]. Unless you're talking about another overview, which... come on, lol.

Seriously, there's so much room for consolidation and accessibility of their documentation. In terms of relaying information on side effects and how to identify those side effects, this is so much less approachable than pandas and sqlalchemy documentation, and that's saying something.

[1] https://docs.docker.com/get-started/overview/

People who read the docs aren’t calling these things footguns though. If you look through the comments section here it’s full of people saying the same thing I’m saying.

Just take the L and do the reading.

The fact that you can't admit that the documentation has wiggle room for improvement here is telling. But by all means keep thinking this was a competition deserving of Ls and continue to miss the simple point. Peace and good luck, friend.

I just wish you’d read the docs before deciding they’re bad. But feel free to creatively misinterpret responses as you see fit.

Doc updates aren’t free, let’s not waste effort fixing a problem that doesn’t exist when there are much better uses for that effort. Moving the words around isn’t going to effect their ability to be understood by those who refuse to actually put eyes on them.

Read the documentation. That's really all you had to do. The docs are clear.

They mention that the port will be published to the internet. Usage of iptables is implementation detailed. They say to make sure to secure it. What else do you want? There is documentation on the behavior in the “docker for Linux” page

I want a damn mention of exactly what is changing on my system!! Why is that hard to understand and why are you trivializing such a big change? This isn't like a config file change that's OS implementation dependent. It's a freaking firewall change that has no obvious mention anywhere in its documentation! That's huge!

Well, here you go I guess? https://docs.docker.com/network/iptables/

I found this right in the docker for linux documentation.

Can I ask, how else would you expect traffic to arrive at your container when you publish a port on the internet?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com