Recenly spend some hours debugging a strange behavior happening only on my local development environment for my Laravel application. My virtual server hosted on Google Cloud seem to not be available when I was attempting to connect from my local machine, but when I attempted to connect from a remote one everything appeared to be working fine. After quite some debugging I found it. It was the default DNS used by my local computer.

Using custom DNS

After this I decided that I am not letting this to luck and that I am going to use the Cloudflare and Google DNS severs for now on.

So my docker-compose.yml file end up looking like this:

  app:
    build: '.'
    dns:
     - 1.1.1.1 # Cloudflare
     - 8.8.8.8 # Google
    volumes:
        - ./:/var/www/app

And everything seem to be working fine at first, until some hours later when I discovered that the host.docker.internal DNS name isn't working anymore.

Local Docker DNS

While developing in a docker container often you may want to connect back to a service on your local machine and for that reason docker provides the usefull special DNS name host.docker.internal. But when using the dns section in you docker-compose.yml the host.docker.internal isn't available anymore.

For that the solution is to also add your local docker DNS ip address to you docker-compose.yml. So if your subnet address is 192.168.65.0/24 then your DNS will probably be the first address 192.168.65.1. So the final version of docker-compose.yml should look like this:

  app:
    build: '.'
    dns:
     - 1.1.1.1 # Cloudflare
     - 8.8.8.8 # Google
     - 192.168.65.1 # Local Docker DNS
    volumes:
        - ./:/var/www/app

Afterwards host.docker.internal shoud work as expected.

You can find your Subnet address under: Resources->Network on your Mac.