When containers may not know the network to which they will be attached, Weave Net enables you to dynamically attach and detach containers to and from a given network, even when a container is already running.

To illustrate…

host1$ C=$(docker run -e WEAVE_CIDR=none -dti weaveworks/ubuntu)
host1$ weave attach $C
10.2.1.3

where,

  • C=$(docker run -e WEAVE_CIDR=none -dti weaveworks/ubuntu) starts a container and assigns its ID to a variable
  • weave attach – the Weave Net command to attach to the specified container
  • 10.2.1.3 - the allocated IP address output by weave attach, in this case in the default subnet

Note If you are using the Weave Docker API proxy, it will have modified DOCKER_HOST to point to the proxy and therefore you will have to pass -e WEAVE_CIDR=none to start a container that doesn’t get automatically attached to the weave network for the purposes of this example.

If weave attach sees the container has a hostname with a domain-name, it will add those into WeaveDNS (unless you turn this off with the --without-dns argument).

host1$ docker run -dti --name=c1 --hostname=c1.weave.local weaveworks/ubuntu
host1$ weave attach c1
10.32.0.1
host1$ weave dns-lookup c1
10.32.0.1

If you would like /etc/hosts to contain the Weave Net address (the same way the proxy does), specify --rewrite-hosts when running weave attach:

host1$ weave attach --rewrite-hosts c1

Dynamically Detaching Containers

A container can be detached from a subnet, by using the weave detach command:

host1$ weave detach $C
10.2.1.3

You can also detach a container from one network and then attach it to a different one:

host1$ weave detach net:default $C
10.2.1.3
host1$ weave attach net:10.2.2.0/24 $C
10.2.2.3

or, attach a container to multiple application networks, effectively sharing the same container between applications:

host1$ weave attach net:default
10.2.1.3
host1$ weave attach net:10.2.2.0/24
10.2.2.3

Finally, multiple addresses can be attached or detached using a single command:

host1$ weave attach net:default net:10.2.2.0/24 net:10.2.3.0/24 $C
10.2.1.3 10.2.2.3 10.2.3.1
host1$ weave detach net:default net:10.2.2.0/24 net:10.2.3.0/24 $C
10.2.1.3 10.2.2.3 10.2.3.1

Important! Any addresses that were dynamically attached will not be re-attached if the container restarts.

See Also