Sometimes (oftentimes?), when debugging Docker based setup, you wish you could access a service running in a container from the outside. Typically, these would be services that are internal to the cluster architecture, but should not be exposed for remote access, e.g. a database, a pub/sub queue, etc. Luckily, the only thing you really need is access to a remote SSH server and accept to (temporarily) add an SSH client to your container. Here is how, documented for an alpine container, but steps will be the same for containers based on other distributions.
Exporting the Service
Start by jumping into your container using docker exec.
$ docker exec -it <containerID> ash
Then from within the container, make sure to install an SSH client. No need for a server here.
$ apk add --no-cache openssh-client
Once installation has succeeded, establish a reverse tunnel onto your host.
Provided that you have a server, within your container, that listens on port
8088, a command similar to the following will make the same port available at
the remote host and return back to the command line of the container (this is
the meaning of -fNT). The command will require you to login at the remote
host, etc. Note that if you did not want to use the same port at the remote
host, you would change the first port number in the argument to -R below.
$ ssh -fNT -R8088:localhost:8088 emmanuel@<yourhost>
It is a good idea to keep the session into the container running, so you can easily return when cleaning up.
Accessing the Service
Now, login to the remote SSH host. You should be able to access the service
running in the container directly under the port 8088. You can check that it
works using something like nc for example:
$ nc -v localhost 8088
Provided that you have a working Docker environment on that host, you can even
use the port for developing from within a container running on that remote
SSH host. This involves sharing the host network with the container and,
perhaps, mounting your development directory into the container. Running the
following command would give you an Alpine based container with your
development directory mounted on /data and where you are able to access
8088 from the container that you wanted to debug.
$ docker run -it --rm --network=host -v `pwd`:/data alpine
Cleaning Up
To clean up, apart from leaving the debugging container described in the
previous section, you should return to the initial container, kill the ssh
process running there are remove the ssh client package from the distribution.