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Marc Ziel
Marc Ziel

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Publishing a port on an existing docker container

When you need to publish some port on a container that was already run, you can do this by changing internal docker files.

First, you need to find the container id with

docker inspect <container_name>
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Stop the container if it's running and go to the container directory:

cd /var/lib/docker/containers/<container_id>
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For wsl users, the container directory can be found here:
\\wsl$\docker-desktop-data\version-pack-data\community\docker\containers

add "ExposedPorts" to config.v2.json:

"Config": {
    ....
    "ExposedPorts": {
        "<port_number>/tcp": {},
    },
    ....
},
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and "PortBindings" to hostconfig.json:

"PortBindings": {
     "<port_number>/tcp": [
         {
             "HostIp": "",
             "HostPort": "<port_number>"
         }
     ]
 }
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For best results restart docker service:

systemctl restart docker
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Now you can start the container and it should have ports published.

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