Connecting to a Docker Host
Next, we want to start a separate command prompt to connect to our local Docker host. To do that, you need to set the URL of the host, turn on TLS if you are using authentication, and ensure you are pointing to the right location for your Docker certificates as shown in the environment variables below. For VirtualBox, as you can see in the screenshot in Figure 4.3, it is using the default machine for certs and is at the IP: 192.168.99.100.
Set Windows Environment Variables
Set DOCKER_CERT_PATH=C:Usersdanielfe.dockermachinemachines
default
Set DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY=1
Set DOCKER_HOST=tcp://192.168.99.100:2376
Set OSX Environment Variables
export DOCKER_CERT_PATH=~/.docker/machine/machines/default
export DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY=1
export DOCKER_HOST=tcp://192.168.99.100:2376
The Product Catalog Microservice
If you remember from the previous chapter, the product catalog microservice is a simple ASP.NET Core 1.0 microservice that exposes a REST API to search and filter a list of products stored in an Elasticsearch backend.
Elasticsearch is a highly scalable engine that enables you to easily search and filter data. Elasticsearch is available as an official Docker image named “elasticsearch.” For the ASP.NET microservice, we’ll use the Nest client library to connect and query Elasticsearch.