Docker exec using TCP via SSH tunnel behaves differently than SSH

General Discussions
1

I’m using Docker compose to spin up an integration test environment of a PHP application, database, etc. Then I execute the tests in the container of my PHP application. I use DOCKER_HOST=ssh://test.server to run the tests remote (from my Mac).

On my Mac I run

DOCKER_HOST=ssh://test.server docker-compose up -d
DOCKER_HOST=ssh://test.server docker exec php-container \
    ./phpunit --configuration config.xml

This is working fine, but slower than a SSH tunnel as suggested by @mottati in this comment. Therefore, I run

  1. on my Mac
    ssh -L 8888:localhost:8888 test.server
  2. on test.server
    socat TCP-LISTEN:8888,reuseaddr,fork UNIX-CONNECT:/var/run/docker.sock
  3. on my Mac
    DOCKER_HOST=tcp://localhost:8888 docker-compose up -d
DOCKER_HOST=tcp://localhost:8888 docker exec php-container \
    ./phpunit --configuration config.xml

However, while

DOCKER_HOST=ssh://test.server docker exec php-container \
    ./phpunit --configuration config.xml

is running the tests fine and shows the output,

DOCKER_HOST=tcp://localhost:8888 docker exec php-container \
    ./phpunit --configuration config.xml

terminates immediately without any output and exit code 0 (according to echo $? run directly afterwards). Any idea what might cause this issue or how to analyze it?

Notes:

  • The output of
    DOCKER_HOST=tcp://localhost:8888 docker exec php-container \
    ./phpunit --version
    and
    DOCKER_HOST=tcp://localhost:8888 docker exec php-container \
    ./phpunit ./some-test-directory
    is shown. It looks like I only can’t run those tests that access the database or do something else that not all tests do. If I exec ps in the container, I see that the phpunit processes never terminate. But what does that all have to do with DOCKER_HOST being tcp://localhost:8888 and not ssh://test.server?

Versions

Mac

  • Docker version 20.10.7
  • docker-compose version 1.29.2, build 5becea4c
  • OpenSSH_8.1p1, LibreSSL 2.7.3

test.server

  • Docker version 20.10.7
  • OpenSSH_8.2p1 Ubuntu-4ubuntu0.2, OpenSSL 1.1.1f 31 Mar 2020
  • socat version 1.7.3.3 on Oct 26 2019 17:42:04

PHP application/container:

  • Docker Image php:7.3-apache
  • PHPUnit 4.8.36 by Sebastian Bergmann and contributors.
1 Like
2

I figured out, where PHPUnit exits. A data provider tries to access the database using the query method of PDO and just exits. The same thing happen if I call the same SQL query

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tablename

in a php script instead of running PHPUnit. Shouldn’t the PHP process exit with a non-zero exit code in such case?