ddev with custom docker container

[premar]

Hello

To generate pdf we want to shift to a container with chromium. But the dev-team need to use the container in ddev to test too.

I created a custom docker-compose.chromium.yaml inside of ddev:

version: '3.6'
services:
  chromium:
    container_name: ddev-${DDEV_SITENAME}-chromium
    hostname: ${DDEV_SITENAME}-chromium
    image: registry.our-company.com/docker-chromium:latest
    ports:
      - "9222"
    environment:
      - VIRTUAL_HOST=$DDEV_HOSTNAME
      - HTTP_EXPOSE=9222:9222
    labels:
      com.ddev.site-name: ${DDEV_SITENAME}
      com.ddev.approot: $DDEV_APPROOT

The idea is to call the container via ws://ddev-xxx-chromium:9222/devtools. The ddev stack is starting without a problem:

ddev start
Starting customer1... 
Container ddev-ssh-agent  Recreate 
Container ddev-ssh-agent  Recreated 
Container ddev-ssh-agent  Started 
Network ddev-customer1_default  Created 
Container ddev-customer1-dba  Started 
Container ddev-customer1-db  Started 
Container ddev-customer1-chromium  Started 
Container ddev-customer1-web  Started 
Container ddev-router  Started 

I can ping the chromium container from within another container:

ping ddev-customer1-chromium
PING ddev-customer1-chromium (172.19.0.2) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from ddev-customer1-chromium.ddev-customer1_default (172.19.0.2): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.294 ms
(...)

But I cannot get access the chromium container endpoint by generated dns-name. I receive a 500 Internal Server Error. But directly with the ip its working:

wget http://ddev-customer1-chromium:9222/json
--2022-11-07 09:51:26--  http://ddev-customer1-chromium:9222/json
Resolving ddev-customer1-chromium (ddev-customer1-chromium)... 172.19.0.2
Connecting to ddev-customer1-chromium (ddev-customer1-chromium)|172.19.0.2|:9222... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 500 Internal Server Error
2022-11-07 09:51:26 ERROR 500: Internal Server Error.

wget http://172.19.0.2:9222/json
--2022-11-07 09:51:42--  http://172.19.0.2:9222/json
Connecting to 172.19.0.2:9222... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 363 [application/json]
Saving to: ‘json.1’

json.1                                       100%[============================================================================================>]     363  --.-KB/s    in 0s      

2022-11-07 09:51:42 (32.5 MB/s) - ‘json.1’ saved [363/363]

I assume the ddev-router is blocking the connection. But why?

Any help would be appreciated.

[tyler36]

Hi @premar

There are 3 Chrome impletation on DDEV-contrib that might help steer you:

• DrupalCI ChromeDriver
• Headless Chrome Service
• Puppeteer Headless Chrome support

The first one has the follow code which relates directly to the router but I'm not 100% sure if it will resolve your problem:

    external_links:
      - ddev-router:${DDEV_SITENAME}.${DDEV_TLD}

[rfay]

• Your 50x errors are 50x errors, so you'll have to look at things like ddev logs -s chromium to understand them. Please check that.
• You can also ddev ssh -s chromium and explore the chromium container. Inside the container,
• curl -I http://chromium:9222 may be interesting (adjust the URL with a path?)
• Create a dummy project that demonstrates this and share it and we can look at it together.

[premar]

Did some debugging today. And I found the problem. I am running chromium with the following parameter:

chromium-browser \ 
    --disable-gpu \
    --disable-software-rasterizer \
    --headless \
    --no-sandbox \
    --allow-insecure-localhost \
    --no-first-run \
    --disable-translate \
    --disable-extensions \
    --enable-logging=stderr \
    --v=1 \
    --remote-debugging-address=0.0.0.0 \
    --remote-debugging-port=9222

As stated the call with IP was working, with the a hostname not. There was no log from the chromium container (even with verbose enabled).

I thought the problem was the ddev router. But your right it was the chromium all along. After some digging I found a similare problem in puppeteer: puppeteer/puppeteer#2242

In short they disable the direct call over a hostname.

Options to work around for this problem:

1. Lookup up the IP of the Container
2. Call the endpoint directly with the IP

Apperently the *.localhost domain is also allowed, so if you rename the container hostname to something.localhost it also works.

I am not happy with neither of those options. But if ever someone is searching for the same problem.

[rfay]

You may want to take a look at the new add-on https://github.com/weitzman/ddev-selenium-standalone-chrome

[premar]

@rfay thanks for the hint, but that would be a little overhead for simply generating pdf's? Our goal ist to use the https://github.com/chrome-php/chrome wrapper to open the chrome remote debug endpoint. There generate the pdf of a given website, and save the result.

And I am not sure if you can call the remote debug endpoint inside of the selenium container. I am going to tweak my container and then publish it later if it works as expected.

But thats all not a problem of ddev. For me the problem is resolved, because it was not ddev in the first place.

[rfay]

You're just trying to generate PDFs? Why don't you try a maintained solution like https://github.com/drud/ddev-pdfreactor ? Or one of many other solutions? Anyway, glad the problem is resolved.