After enabling healthcheck in our setup we weren't able to deploy this setup anymore. We've found out, that when enabling healthcheck containers can't resolve their service names. This includes the name of the container itself.

We are deploying via docker stack deploy --compose-file docker-compose.yml minitest and tested it using docker 17.03, 17.06 and 17.10. We could observe the problem on all three versions.

I've created a minimal example. The two containers are pinging each other and as a primitive healthcheck we ping localhost.

Using docker-compose with this compose-file will lead to a working setup; using stack deploy will restart the containers time and time again.

version: '3'

services:
  mini-1:
    image: debian
    deploy:
      replicas: 1
    command: bash -c "sleep 15; ping mini-2 > /tmp/mini-1.log"
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "ping", "-c", "1", "localhost"]
      interval: 1m30s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 3
    volumes:
      - /minimal_example/mini-1.log:/tmp/mini-1.log      
    networks:
      mini-network:
        aliases:
          - mini

  mini-2:
    image: debian
    deploy:
      replicas: 1
    command: bash -c "sleep 15; ping mini-1 > /tmp/mini-2.log"
    healthcheck:
      test: ["CMD", "ping", "-c", "1", "localhost"]
      interval: 1m30s
      timeout: 10s
      retries: 3
    volumes:
      - /minimal_example/mini-2.log:/tmp/mini-2.log
    networks:
      mini-network:
        aliases:
          - mini

networks:
  mini-network:
    driver: overlay

Here is what I am doing (read it & weep):

• create the services with 0 replicas
• extract the VIP from the service definition (docker service inspect...)

function extract_vip()
{
	local SERVICE_NAME=$1
	local NETWORK_NAME=$2

	local NETWORK_ID=$(docker network inspect --format='{{.Id}}' "${NETWORK_NAME}")

	local ADDR=$(docker service inspect --format="{{range .Endpoint.VirtualIPs}}{{if eq .NetworkID \"${NETWORK_ID}\"}}{{.Addr}}{{end}}{{end}}" "${SERVICE_NAME}")
	# ADDR=10.0.21.11/24; Trim off the /24 to get just the address
	VIP=${ADDR%/*}
	echo ${VIP}
}

• define environment variables with these values
• use these in the YAML file extra_hosts
• now change the replicas to what you want & update the services (replicas can be defined using environment variables) So your service is something like this:

replicas: ${REPLICAS_MYSERVICE}
extra_hosts:
- "hostname:${hostname_vip}

Unfortunately, extra_hosts doesn't work on Windows so I may try with a docker config to replace the hosts file for Windows.