How to reach docker containers by name instead of IP address?

Docker 1.10 has a built in DNS. If your containers are connected to the same user defined network (create a network docker network create my-network and run your container with --net my-network) they can reference each other using the container name. (Docs).

Cool!

One caveat if you are using Docker compose you know that it adds a prefix to your container names, i.e. <project name>_<service name>-#. This makes your container names somewhat more difficult to control, but it might be ok for your use case. You can override the docker compose naming functionality by manually setting the container name in your compose template, but then you wont be able to scale with compose.

Create a new bridge network other than docker0, run your containers inside it and you can reference the containers inside that network by their names.

Docker daemon runs an embedded DNS server to provide automatic service discovery for containers connected to user-defined networks. Name resolution requests from the containers are handled first by the embedded DNS server.

Try this:

docker network create <network name>
docker run --net <network name> --name test busybox nc -l 0.0.0.0:7000
docker run --net <network name> busybox ping test

First, we create a new network. Then, we run a busybox container named test listening on port 7000 (just to keep it running). Finally, we ping the test container by its name and it should work.