Windows – use named pipes inside containers

dockernamed-pipeswindowswindows 10

I am trying to use named pipes for inter-process communication inside a docker container but am getting "not found" errors when trying to read/write. Does docker for windows support named pipes? The software's been released and I know it works fine in VMs. I just can't find anything saying yes or no that containers on windows support named pipes.

I've got an IIS application with a named pipe binding installed inside the container along with a client application also inside the container trying to communicate via net.pipe://localhost. My run command looks like this

docker run -it -m 2GB -p 80:80 --network External company/appserver

The error message is

The pipe endpoint 'net.pipe://localhost/WCFSvc/WCF.svc' could not be
found on your local machine

Best Answer

You can mount named pipes into Docker containers, but this only works on Windows Server 1709 and later. I put an example in my blog post: https://blog.docker.com/2017/09/docker-windows-server-1709/

docker run -d -p 8080:8080 -v \\.\pipe\docker_engine:\\.\pipe\docker_engine friism/jenkins