Something a little annoying about setting up a server on Docker Machine is that to use the service you need to know the ip of the machine:

docker-machine ip machine_name

This can get tedious, specially if you are using GUI tools. In the last post I described a way to ssh into a Docker machine. Because we have the power of ssh, we can now port forward:

machine=machine_name; ssh -i ~/.docker/machine/machines/$machine/id_rsa docker@$(docker-machine ip $machine) -N -L local_port:localhost:machine_port

Now we never have to remember the ip address of the Docker machine. We can simply connect to our local port on localhost.