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moby
libnetwork
Go2015–2025
moby / libnetwork

libnetwork

networking for containers

Systems & InfrastructureNetworking
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
10Distinct people
11Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
2.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

networking for containers

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year11 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-07-11 03:10:41 UTC to 2025-09-09 15:41:52 UTC.

01232015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

11 sources
cyphar·Sep 9, 2025
> v29.0 will have support for nftables. It'll be marked as experimental in the first few releases to allow us to change anything without worrying about backward compatibility. It would've been nice to at least link to the EPIC[1] to provide some kind of evidence that it is actually been worked on. Sorry to be a bit snarky, but this has been a known issue for 9 years now[2,3,4] with no development despite claims to the contrary by Docker Inc (Mirantis now, I guess?). Out of interest, is this being merged with libnetwork or is being implemented separately (a quick look gave me the impression it was being implemented separately but libnetwork was re-merged to Docker a while ago). Also I guess your comment in [5] is outdated and it will actually be in v29? [1]: https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/49634 [2]: https://github.com/moby/libnetwork/
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issues/1998 [3]: https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/26824 [4]: https://github.com/docker/for-linux/issues/1472 [5]: https://github.com/docker/for-linux/issues/1472#issuecomment...
In Docker Considered Harmful (2025)
maccam94·May 2, 2018
There's nothing about Go that makes it particularly good for containers. It actually requires some ugly hacks in C to make it handle namespaces correctly (because namespaces are configured per-thread, and Go decides to spawn new threads somewhat arbitrarily which is not visible to the program). https://github.com/docker/libnetwork/issues/1113 https://github.com/docker/libcontainer/tree/master/nsenter https://www.weave.works/blog/linux-namespaces-and-go-don-t-m... EDIT: TIL this is fixed in Go 1.10 which came out in February: https://golang.org/doc/go1.10#runtime If rust continues to improve ergonomics and library support, I don't see anything stopping it from replacing C except in niche embedded systems that don't get LLVM support.
In KRust: A Formal Executable Semantics of Rust
BretFisher·Mar 25, 2018
Could it be that the teams are simply focused on adding K8s support and getting the Docker EE out of Beta? Public statement on their blog after the K8s announcement in EU: "But it’s equally important for us to note that Swarm orchestration is not going away. Swarm forms an integral cluster management component of the Docker EE platform; in addition, Swarm will operate side-by-side with Kubernetes in a Docker EE cluster, allowing customers to select, based on their needs, the most suitable orchestration tool at application deployment time." https://blog.docker.com/2017/11/swarm-orchestration-in-docke... There's still plenty of PR's and activity in the SwarmKit and Libnetwork repos: https://github.com/docker/swarmkit/pulse/monthly https://github.com/docker/libnetwork/pulse/monthly
In Cluster and app management services in Docker Cloud are shutting down on May 21
cpuguy83·May 20, 2017
Let me start off by saying yes it's awful that Docker is inserted at the top of the chain. This is a legacy that we'll have to work around to make work with existing rules. However, UFW is an awful iptables citizen as it assumes it is the sole owner of iptables. In general Docker does try to be a good iptables citizen and generally assume that it's not the only thing doing iptables work. The existing behavior where docker sits above everything else in iptables is unfortunate but has been around since forever and is not easy to change without breaking lots of existing installations. Please take a look at https://github.com/docker/libnetwork/pull/1675 as at least a partial solution to this.
In Docker overrules UFW
shykes·Oct 26, 2016
Docker founder here. > What is the motivation and benefit for running containers without docker? I regularly hear from people who want to run containers without Docker. There are several motivations, all of which are perfectly valid: 1. Learning. It's fun to build things from scratch to understand how they work under the hood. 2. Bad experience. Early versions of Docker were quite buggy, and we initially struggled to keep up with the colossal growth in usage and feature requests. As a result, many of the people who tried Docker in production too early were badly disappointed. Some of them decided Docker wasn't for them, and started looking for alternatives. 3. Extremely custom use case. If your deployment is larger, or more complex, or more specialized than 99.99% of deployments out there, then "mainstream" platforms like Docker might not
Read the rest
be the right fit for you. Of course we try to make Docker as customizable as possible, to support more a wider spectrum of use cases with plugins. But realistically, no single platform can cover all use cases, and I don't think any platform ever will. Docker is no exception. 4. Philosophy disagreement. Different people have different opinions on how applications should be developed and deployed. Docker tries very hard to be agnostic - to accommodate as many opinions as possible. But we can't please everybody. If Docker does not fit your philosophy of development and deployment, then the natural response is to look for an alternative. 5. Competition. Many Docker competitors started out as extensions or modifications of Docker, and over time are looking to reduce their dependency on Docker. I'm probably missing other reasons, but these are the ones I've been most exposed to. These are all reasonable reasons to not want to use Docker. Our approach is that, if you want to run containers without Docker, we should make it as easy as possible. In practice that means spinning out as many of the underlying components as possible (what we call the "plumbing") so that you can assemble it yourself without being stuck using the entire Docker platform. For example: - containerd [https://github.com/docker/containerd] is our low-level container runtime. - runc [https://runc.io] is a standardized "container executor", which we donated to the Linux Foundation as the reference foundation for the OCI spec. - libnetwork [https://github.com/docker/libnetwork] is the low-level networking implementation (including overlay networking which is a very useful primitive for container clustering) - swarmkit [https://github.com/docker/swarmkit] is a clustering/orchestration implementation - notary [https://github.com/docker/notary] is a cryptographic content verification tool, which you can use to sign and verify container images. - infrakit [https://github.com/docker/infrakit] automates the provisioning of infrastructure capable of running containers. Our opinion is that, even if you don't use Docker, by using these components for your own purposes, you are indirectly contributing to making Docker better. Splitting out these components has also forced us to refactor Docker into a more modular, more robust design. We even send Docker employees to explain how to run containers without Docker :) For example here's a talk we gave at Linuxcon: https://linuxconcontainerconeurope2016.sched.org/event/7oHM/...
In Running containers without Docker
shykes·Jun 9, 2016
It's the latter. As we build up the Docker platform we're spinning out small individual components (the "plumbing") which other products can use and contribute back to. Here are a few of the components we have open-sourced recently: * https://github.com/docker/swarmkit * https://github.com/docker/hyperkit * https://github.com/docker/vpnkit * https://github.com/docker/datakit * https://github.com/docker/containerd * https://github.com/docker/notary * https://github.com/opencontainers/runc * https://github.com/docker/libnetwork * https://github.com/docker/libcompose
In SwarmKit by Docker: a toolkit to orchestrate distributed systems at any scale
theod·Jul 11, 2015
Docker's native CNM (Container Network Model) provides a out-of-the-box solution to support this use-case. Pls refer to https://github.com/docker/libnetwork/blob/master/docs/design... for more info on Docker CNM. This eliminates the need for any custom scripts to achieve the swappable use-case that you have in mind. The CNM is realized using the newly introduced Experimental Networking solutions which includes : Network & Service UI, Pluggable Service-Discovery and Native Multi-Host cross-container connectivity. More information on trying out these experimental feature : https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/experimental/ne... https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/master/experimental/RE... Service (aka endpoint) owns the networking configs (such as ip-address, mac-address, etc...) and the container that backs the service can be sw
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apped while retaining the same networking and service configs. Hence swapping a container between older to newer version of app server is just a matter of detaching a service from the older container and attaching the same service back to the newer container. Also, Please note that a container can belong to multiple networks and each container can publish different services in different network. With these simple and composable CNM design, your use-case can be mapped to the CNM model. A quick diagram explaining the concept : https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1LvD94UwfinQelpEqT9BaRYmi... We can add more detailed documentation for this specific use-case. Please join us in https://github.com/docker/libnetwork and IRC@freenode #docker-network channel to discuss this in more detail.
In Ask HN: Zero-downtime deployment of multi-container app

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