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Running etcd in Docker Containers

By Rob Szumski, December 13, 2013

Originally published on the CoreOS blog (archived copy) . Re-published with the authors' permission.

Update: This blog post refers to functionality in an older version of etcd, 0.4.x. Check out the updated Docker guide for up-to-date information.

etcd is a highly-available key value store for shared configuration and service discovery. Running etcd within a docker container is a convenient way to deploy etcd or test out a sample cluster. Etcd containers are very easy to run — you just need to manipulate a few of the flags to make the networking work correctly. You can grab the etcd container or have docker download it automatically.

Start Containers

We’re going to start three containers that use port 500x for the client communication and port 800x for the intra-cluster/raft communication. A few of the flags need to be modified per container:

• -name needs to be unique

• -peer-addr and -addr need to contain the IP where the machine can be reached on the outside of the container and a unique port number

• -peers needs to contain a list of current members of the cluster and the port for server/raft communication (800x). The first container doesn’t need the -peers list since it will be the master.

In this example, all three of these containers will be running on the same machine. Here are the three docker run commands that will get the cluster up and running. First, export a variable with your public IP address:

export PUBLIC_IP=54.196.167.255

And then start up our leader + two followers:

docker run -d -p 8001:8001 -p 5001:5001 quay.io/coreos/etcd:v0.4.6 -peer-addr ${PUBLIC_IP}:8001 -addr ${PUBLIC_IP}:5001 -name etcd-node1

docker run -d -p 8002:8002 -p 5002:5002 quay.io/coreos/etcd:v0.4.6 -peer-addr ${PUBLIC_IP}:8002 -addr ${PUBLIC_IP}:5002 -name etcd-node2 -peers ${PUBLIC_IP}:8001,${PUBLIC_IP}:8002,${PUBLIC_IP}:8003

docker run -d -p 8003:8003 -p 5003:5003 quay.io/coreos/etcd:v0.4.6 -peer-addr ${PUBLIC_IP}:8003 -addr ${PUBLIC_IP}:5003 -name etcd-node3 -peers ${PUBLIC_IP}:8001,${PUBLIC_IP}:8002,${PUBLIC_IP}:8003

Testing the Cluster

You should be able to test the cluster by curling any of the machines in the cluster or viewing the dashboard in a browser. Let’s request /stats/leader which should indicate that all of our followers connected successfully:

curl -L 54.196.167.255:5001/v2/stats/leader

You should see something that looks like:

{"leader":"etcd-node1","followers":{"etcd-node2":{"latency":{"current":1.33342,"average":1.6575929235264224,"standardDeviation":0.8596793375097724,"minimum":1.034932,"maximum":27.428239},"counts":{"fail":4,"success":3936}},"etcd-node3":{"latency":{"current":1.448973,"average":1.7457679780163597,"standardDeviation":2.3964311316740465,"minimum":1.063433,"maximum":86.745084},"counts":{"fail":14,"success":3912}}}}

As you can see, etcd-node1 is the current leader and etcd-node2 and etcd-node3 are successfully connected as followers. You can check out the dashboard module at /mod/dashboard but you’ll need to launch etcd with -cors='*' to make the cross-origin requests work.

Flags

Below is a quick description of the flags we used in this example and some other common ones:

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