In the preceding section, indecently, from the warning message, we find out that the IP address of the container is 172.17.0.13. On a fully configured HTTP server container, no such warning is available, so let's still run the docker inspect subcommand to retrieve the IP address using the container ID:
$ sudo docker inspect
--format='{{.NetworkSettings.IPAddress}}'
9d4d3566e55c0b8829086e9be2040751017989a47b5411c9c4f170ab865afcef
172.17.0.13
Having found the IP address of the container as 172.17.0.13, let's quickly run a web request on this IP address from the shell prompt of the Docker host, using the wget command. Here, we choose to run the wget command with -qO - in order to run in the quiet mode and also display the retrieved HTML file on the screen:
$ wget -qO - 172.17.0.13
Here, we are showcasing just the first five lines of the retrieved HTML file:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<!--
Modified from the Debian original for Ubuntu
Last updated: 2014-03-19
Awesome, isn't it? We got our first service running in a container, and we are able to reach out to our service from our Docker host.
Furthermore, on a plain vanilla Docker installation, the service offered by one container is accessible by any other container within the Docker host. You can go ahead, launch a new Ubuntu container in the interactive mode, install the wget package using apt-get, and run the same wget -qO - 172.17.0.13 command, as we did in the Docker host. Of course, you will see the same output.