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Using Temporal.io docker-compose with host networking

Temporal's docker-compose is excellent for having a basic temporal server and UI to play around with while running its tutorials. Naturally, if you have your docker-compose in a project, copying the definition of temporal, elasticsearch and temporal-ui containers will be good enough to make temporal part of your dev environment, especially if you use docker networks as follows:

networks:
  temporal-network:
    driver: bridge
    name: temporal-network

Unfortunately is not my case. Due to some legacy complexity of my project, I have to use:

network_mode: host

This network move forbids me from using container names to do networking between containers in my docker-compose file. The temporal.io auto-setup docker image assumes you're running docker-compose networks, so it wrongly attempts to connect to temporal:7233 as part of the initialization of the temporal cluster.

To fix the situation, I added an environment variable to your temporal container as follows:

- BIND_ON_IP=127.0.0.1

My docker-compose definition looks like this:

temporal:
    network_mode: host
    depends_on:
      - database
    environment:
      - DB=postgresql
      - DB_PORT=5432
      - POSTGRES_USER=temporal
      - POSTGRES_PWD=temporal
      - POSTGRES_SEEDS=localhost
      - DYNAMIC_CONFIG_FILE_PATH=config/dynamicconfig/development-sql.yaml
      - ENABLE_ES=true
      - ES_SEEDS=localhost
      - ES_VERSION=v7
      # - TEMPORAL_CLI_ADDRESS=localhost:7233
      - BIND_ON_IP=127.0.0.1
    image: temporalio/auto-setup:1.17.1
    ports:
      - 7233:7233
    volumes:
      - ./scripts/temporal/dynamicconfig:/etc/temporal/config/dynamicconfig
  temporal-admin-tools:
    network_mode: host
    depends_on:
      - temporal
    environment:
      - TEMPORAL_CLI_ADDRESS=localhost:7233
    image: temporalio/admin-tools:1.17.1
    stdin_open: true
    tty: true
  elasticsearch:
    network_mode: host
    environment:
      - cluster.routing.allocation.disk.threshold_enabled=true
      - cluster.routing.allocation.disk.watermark.low=512mb
      - cluster.routing.allocation.disk.watermark.high=256mb
      - cluster.routing.allocation.disk.watermark.flood_stage=128mb
      - discovery.type=single-node
      - ES_JAVA_OPTS=-Xms256m -Xmx256m
      - xpack.security.enabled=false
    image: elasticsearch:7.16.2
    expose:
      - 9200
  temporal-ui:
    network_mode: host
    depends_on:
      - temporal
    environment:
      - TEMPORAL_ADDRESS=localhost:7233
      - TEMPORAL_CORS_ORIGINS=http://localhost:3000
    image: temporalio/ui:2.2.1
    ports:
      - 8080:8080

There are quite a few knobs in the initialization of a Temporal cluster. Unfortunately, the documentation still falls short in this area; I recommend you look at how auto-setup works works and read auto-setup.sh to learn some of the steps you have to do yourself outside docker-compose.

Happy temporal hacking!