At its simplest, you can bind a container to a specific network at runtime. For example, the nginx container exposes port 80. To bind that to port 8080 on your Droplet’s private network, run:
- docker run -p priv.net.ip.addr:8080:80 nginx
Docker also provides many more complex networking options. For a high level overview, see:
For a deeper dive, take a look at “Understand Docker container networks” from the Docker docs.
Using some of the concepts covered there, you could also create a new bridge network that is available over your private IP address. For example,
- docker network create -o "com.docker.network.bridge.host_binding_ipv4"="priv.net.ip.addr" privnet
Now to specify that a container should use this new bridge network instead of using docker0
, run it with:
- docker run --net=privnet -p 8080:80 nginx

by Justin Ellingwood
When constructing distributed systems to serve Docker containers, communication and networking become extremely important. In this guide, we will discuss the various networking strategies and tools used to mold the networks used by containers into their desired state.