Disable networking for a container

If you want to completely disable the networking stack on a container, you can use the --network none flag when starting the container. Within the container, only the loopback device is created. The following example illustrates this.

  1. Create the container.

    $ docker run --rm -dit \
  --network none \
  --name no-net-alpine \
  alpine:latest \
  ash

  2. Check the container’s network stack, by executing some common networking commands within the container. Notice that no eth0 was created.

    $ docker exec no-net-alpine ip link show

1: lo: <LOOPBACK,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 65536 qdisc noqueue state UNKNOWN qlen 1
    link/loopback 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00
2: tunl0@NONE: <NOARP> mtu 1480 qdisc noop state DOWN qlen 1
    link/ipip 0.0.0.0 brd 0.0.0.0
3: ip6tnl0@NONE: <NOARP> mtu 1452 qdisc noop state DOWN qlen 1
    link/tunnel6 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00 brd 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00

    $ docker exec no-net-alpine ip route

    The second command returns empty because there is no routing table.

  3. Stop the container. It is removed automatically because it was created with the --rm flag.

    $ docker stop no-net-alpine

Next steps

network, none, standalone