The April 2018 update for Windows brought a few cool things but the best one (imho) is that now we can now connect to Windows containers locally using ‘localhost’ and the port specified upon container runtime.

Let’s have a look at how this works.

First, spin up a container:-

docker run -d -p 15789:1433 `
    --env ACCEPT_EULA=Y `
        --env SA_PASSWORD=Testing1122 `
            --name testcontainer `
                microsoft/mssql-server-windows-developer:latest

Previously, if we wanted to connect to the container locally, we would have had to grab its Private IP by running: –

docker inspect -f '{{range .NetworkSettings.Networks}}{{.IPAddress}}{{end}}' testcontainer

Not any more though! We can now use ‘localhost’ and the port number.

This update was available for a while in the Windows 10 insiders track but it’s now gone GA. Pretty cool as this functionality has been around for Linux containers since, well, forever.

Thanks for reading!