Docker doesn't run under Windows as it uses a number of Linux kernel commands to run the virtualisation. Instead it runs in a Linux VM which has been made easier by the Docker people by using an application called Boot2Docker. Once everything is downloaded, you just follow the instructions to setup up Boot2Docker (I was setting it up to run on command line) and test docker by running'docker ps'.
Once docker was running I then pulled the rabbitmq docker file down from the main repo 'docker pull rabbitmq'. To run a simple rabbitmq service its then just a matter of running the docker container. However, because I wanted to contact the container from my Windows host I had to publish the rabbitmq default port (5672).
docker run -d -p 5672 -e RABBITMQ_NODENAME=my-rabbit --name some-rabbit rabbitmq:3
Now that the rabbitmq container was running and exposing its port I needed to connect to it. I chose a simple ruby client (bunny Gem).
require "bunny"
# Start a communication session with RabbitMQ
conn = Bunny.new("amqp://guest:guest@192.168.59.103:32769")
conn.start
# open a channel
ch = conn.create_channel
# declare a queue
q = ch.queue("test1")
# publish a message to the default exchange which then gets routed to this queue
q.publish("Hello, everybody!")
# fetch a message from the queue
delivery_info, metadata, payload = q.pop
puts "This is the message: #{payload}"
# close the connection
conn.stop
I did get caught out with the connection string. Because the container is running in the boot2docker vm its actually exposing its rabbitMQ port through this. Therefore, I needed to connect to the boot2docker vm first on the port forwarded to 5672.
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| Working out the connection string |
'boot2docker ip' gives the ip address of the vm and using 'docker port some-rabbit 5672' gives the port that boot2docker is forwarding to 5672. This then gave me the connection string for the client to use and bingo, it worked.
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| Success |
