Windows hosts file has wrong IP address for host.docker.internal

[jcoutch]

This was originally opened as #8988, but was never acted upon and auto-closed. This is still a (highly annoying) issue.

• I have tried with the latest version of my channel (Stable or Edge)
• I have uploaded Diagnostics

Expected behavior

Hosts file contains the correct IP address for the primary network interface for both host.docker.internal and gateway.docker.internal.

Actual behavior

Docker for Windows pulls the IP address of a random network adapter (usually one that's not even connected), and uses that as the IP address.

Information

• Windows Version: 10.0.19042
• Docker Desktop Version: 3.1.0 (51484)
• Are you running inside a virtualized Windows e.g. on a cloud server or on a mac VM: No

Steps to reproduce the behavior

Have multiple network cards connected to a machine, and randomly connect/disconnect them to get the wrong IP address populated.

Proposed solution

Allow the user to specify which network adapter to use for populating the host.docker.internal and gateway.docker.internal addresses. At the very minimum, give us the option to turn the auto-update of the IP address off. Or, even better, define a loopback network interface with a known IP address so you don't have to mess with the hosts file constantly!

[gregbown]

This is still problematic in version 3.3.1 (63152)
The GUI is not very helpful, as in there is nowhere to look up the internal IP or refresh it. So if it gets out of sync with your host file, you must restart Docker or your system in order to see it in your host file.

Please add a way to configure this or check it in the Docker GUI, or maybe post documentation on how to work around tis issue

[mg-christian-axelsson]

Still an issue after updating to 3.5.1

[docker-robott]

Issues go stale after 90 days of inactivity.
Mark the issue as fresh with /remove-lifecycle stale comment.
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/lifecycle stale

[jcoutch]

/remove-lifecycle stale

[jcoutch]

/lifecycle frozen

[tommitytom]

This is highly annoying. Are there any good workarounds? I've lost days of development time due to this issue

[bertenvdb]

Still a problem in 4.8.1. Just lost about 4 hours finding out why some services suddenly don't work anymore.

[andrii-myronenko]

Highly annoing problem. Are there any workarounds for this?

[ivalduan]

Same problem here. Closely related with #10856 #11814

[ivalduan]

As a temporal solution you can modify the hosts file properties to be read-only.