Why is the Node.js AWS-SDK returning the wrong SQS queue URL when creating a local queue

Question

I'm using ElasticMQ to simulate AWS SQS on my local dev machine. I'm running ElasticMQ inside a Docker container, using docker-osx-dev to host the Docker container on a Linux VM. This means that I access the local ElasticMQ instance at the IP of the VM, not my localhost IP.

When I try and create a queue in EMQ using the code below, it returns a queue URL at localhost and not the IP of the VM hosting the docker container.

var AWS = require('aws-sdk');
var config = {
  endpoint: new AWS.Endpoint('http://192.168.59.103:9324'),
  accessKeyId: 'na',
  secretAccessKey: 'na',
  region: 'us-west-2'
}
var sqs = new AWS.SQS(config);
var params = {
  QueueName: 'test_queue'
};
sqs.createQueue(params, function(err, data) {
  if (err) {
    console.log(err);
  } else {
    console.log(data.QueueUrl);
  }
});

Currently this code returns: http://localhost:9324/queue/test_queue, but it should return http://192.168.59.103:9324/queue/test_queue. If I replace 'localhost' in the URL with the actual IP address, I can access the queue with that URL successfully, indicating that it was indeed created, but this is a pretty nasty hack. What do I need to change in the code above to correct this issue?

Update: Invalid Endpoint I returned to this after another issue came up using an ElasticMQ simulation container. This time it was part of a docker-compose file and another container was accessing it by it's docker hostname. SQS will not accept host names with underscores in them. This will mess with most peoples docker-compose files as underscores are common. If you get an error message about invalid endpoints, try renaming your container in the compose file with a hyphen instead of an underscore (i.e. http://sqs_local:9324 will fail, http://sqs-local:9324 will be fine).

Thanks. Really needed this today. – RichS Sep 15 '16 at 12:20 — RichS, Sep 15 '16 at 12:20

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 29 '16 at 20:22

2

The problem you're facing it that ElasticMq is exposing the host and port of the container it's running in. This is a problem I've faced before and fixed it by creating a custom Docker container that lets you set the host and port programmatically.

I've written a blog post on how to fix it, but in essence what you need to do is:

Use my custom image tddmonkey/elasticmq
Set the NODE_HOST and NODE_PORT environment variables when you create the container.

Ultimately your command line for this is:

$ docker run -e NODE_HOST=`docker-machine ip default` -e NODE_PORT=8000 -p 8000:9324 tddmonkey/elasticmq

answered Feb 29 '16 at 20:22

tddmonkey

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Thanks so much for the quick answer! That seems to be working perfectly now. On the subject; Do you know if there's a simple way to forward all of the VM machine's ports to localhost, to avoid the need to lookup the VM's IP address when setting your endpoints etc? – LaserJesus Feb 29 '16 at 21:24
I guess you're talking about being able to use `localhost` instead of the VM IP address? If so it's not as simple as port forwards the VM ports, you need localhost to forward all communication on those ports too. To be honest, I doubt it's worth the effort as your production code should be configurable to accept different target IPs – tddmonkey Feb 29 '16 at 21:56
Cool, I set endpoints etc through environment variables / config files, so it's easy enough to change as needed. Just wondering if there was a 'silver bullet'. – LaserJesus Feb 29 '16 at 22:03

Why is the Node.js AWS-SDK returning the wrong SQS queue URL when creating a local queue

1 Answers1