Set a static IP for docker-compose containers

I have an amazing setup on my office. It’s an extended version of Halcyon, with a VPN and DNS container. But there is was one thing that was going wrong..

Each time I restarted the server (or that time when a power outage occurred), the container’s internal IP addresses would change. The VPN container, and the configuration files generated by the container are set to use the DNS container with it’s internal IP address.

That meant that I had to setup VPN access whenever the server restarted. This is a huge problem, especially when you’re far away from home.

The solution

The solution is actually much easier than I expected, the only thing I had to do was setting the ipv4 address in my docker-compose.yml file, as below:

    networks:
      default:
        ipv4_address: 172.24.0.79

All my containers were already connected to shared network, this is accomplished by adding these lines of code your docker-compose.yml file:

networks:
  default:
    external:
      name: your-network-name

The network is created by:

docker network create your-network-name

Happy developing!