nginx


ERROR: for container_a UnixHTTPConnectionPool(host=’localhost’, port=None): Read timed out. (read timeout=60)

There is this docker server that we have access to, which probably due to lousy planning, we put way too many containers on it. The server does not have SSD disks, and for that reason, whenever there are too many IO operations, it becomes unresponsive. When we mass update all containers by updating the images using the following command and then issuing a fresh docker-compose, we get a lot of time-out errors.

The commands we use to update the images and recreate our containers using the new images are the following:
(Please note that these commands need to execute from the folder where the file docker-compose.yml resides)

#Update all docker images that have the 'latest' tag
docker images --format "{{.Repository}}:{{.Tag}}" | grep ':latest' | xargs -L1 docker pull;
#Rebuild all containers using the new images.
docker-compose up -d;

After executing the second command, we often get many copies of the following error:

ERROR: for container_a  UnixHTTPConnectionPool(host='localhost', port=None): Read timed out. (read timeout=60)

This error indicates that the recreate command was waiting for too long for the docker daemon to respond with no success. At the end of the output, we can see that it was waiting for 60 seconds.

At the end of the output, we get the following information and advice:

ERROR: An HTTP request took too long to complete. Retry with --verbose to obtain debug information.
If you encounter this issue regularly because of slow network conditions, consider setting COMPOSE_HTTP_TIMEOUT to a higher value (current value: 60).

Following the advice, we used the following command to overwrite the value of the COMPOSE_HTTP_TIMEOUT variable to a more significant number.

#Increase timeout period to 120 seconds.
export COMPOSE_HTTP_TIMEOUT=120;
#Rebuild all containers using the new images.
docker-compose up -d;

Doing so, we were able to rebuild all containers without reissuing many times the up command.

Sidenote

This server really does have a lot of containers, we had to create the file /etc/docker/daemon.json so that we would have enough network addressing space to handle all the bridges and sub-networks.

The contents of /etc/docker/daemon.json are:

{
  "default-address-pools": [
    {
      "base": "172.80.0.0/16",
      "size": 24
    },
    {
      "base": "172.90.0.0/16",
      "size": 24
    }
  ]
}

The above configuration solved the following problem for us:

ERROR: could not find an available, non-overlapping IPv4 address pool among the defaults to assign to the network

Docker: WARNING: Host is already in use by another container

We use docker to manage multiple instances of various tools on a server that we control. We have an Nginx server working as a reverse proxy that forwards all requests to the appropriate containers in the configuration. Sometimes, after updating the container images and recreating the containers, we get the error that ports 80 and 443 are already in use by another container. This problem can happen even if no other container asks for them.

The following excerpt demonstrates the problem as mentioned above.

tux@server:~/docker-compose$ docker-compose up -d --remove-orphans;
Recreating container_a ... 
Recreating container_a ... done
Recreating container_b   ... done
Recreating container_c          ... 
Recreating nginx_reverse_proxy        ... error
Recreating container_d          ... done
Recreating container_e       ... done
Recreating container_f  ... done
WARNING: Host is already in use by another container

ERROR: for nginx_reverse_proxy  Cannot start service nginx_reverse_proxy: driver failed programming external connectivity on endpoint nginx_reverse_proxy (5a790ed7e1b24aa36cb88cbd3f49d306efa8fe023bf5b3312655218319f23a35): Bind for 0.0.0.0:443 failed: port is already allocated

ERROR: for nginx_reverse_proxy  Cannot start service nginx_reverse_proxy: driver failed programming external connectivity on endpoint nginx_reverse_proxy (5a790ed7e1b24aa36cb88cbd3f49d306efa8fe023bf5b3312655218319f23a35): Bind for 0.0.0.0:443 failed: port is already allocated
ERROR: Encountered errors while bringing up the project.
tux@server:~/docker-compose$ sudo systemctl restart docker.socket docker.service;

To solve this issue, we had to restart two services using the systemctl command:

  • docker.socket
  • docker.service

Specifically, on an Ubuntu server, we used the following command:

sudo systemctl restart docker.socket docker.service;

413 Request Entity Too Large

We tried to upload a large file to a WordPress site and got the following error:

413 Request Entity Too Large

The WordPress installation was behind an Nginx reverse proxy.

To fix this, we added the following line in the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf configuration file inside the http section/context:

client_max_body_size 64M;
http {
    ...

    client_max_body_size 64M;

    ...
}

Syntax: client_max_body_size size;
When client_max_body_size is not set, it defaults to the value of one megabyte;
It can be set to any of the three following contexts: http, server, location
client_max_body_size sets the maximum allowed size of the client request body. If the size in a request exceeds the configured value, the 413 (Request Entity Too Large) error is returned to the client. Please be aware that browsers cannot correctly display this error. Setting size to 0 disables checking of client request body size.

Source: https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#client_max_body_size

After making the change to the configuration file, we restarted Nginx to apply the changes.