Adjusting Docker To Handle Recent mssql Container Changes
Our team uses docker-compose to create temporary ephemeral databases that we can use for integration tests and then dispose. We were using the mssql/server:2019-latest image, but today the builds all randomly stopped working without much info. The only detail I could find was a single line in the build log: dependency failed to start: container <name> is unhealthy. Everything worked fine locally. I found this post on Reddit which helped me realize my local system was pulling the old cached versions of the images. I performed the following two commands to recreate the error on my machine: docker compose pull then docker compose up -d --force-recreate.
When I visited Microsoft’s Docker Repository I saw that the image was modified today, so I figured something must have changed with the image. After more digging, I found the following GitHub Issue that detailed the same issue for the mssql/server:2022-latest image. Here I saw that the latest packages are now including the new mssql-tools18 package, which changes the directory of the ODBC tools we were using for a health check on our container. It seems like a lot of people copied and pasted the same health check from somewhere. The old broken health check: test: /opt/mssql-tools/bin/sqlcmd -S localhost -U sa -P "$$SA_PASSWORD" -Q "SELECT 1" || exit 1 becomes the new working health check: test: /opt/mssql-tools18/bin/sqlcmd -C -S localhost -U sa -P "$${SA_PASSWORD}" -Q "SELECT 1" -b -o /dev/null and now everything works again.
Another alternative would be to pin your container version to mssql/server:2022-CU13-ubuntu-20.04 instead of using the unpinned version.
They probably should have used a symlink for backwards compatiblity. It appears they haven’t yet fixed their documentation to reflect this change, so beware!