Connection refused on docker container

You need to publish the exposed ports by using the following options:

-P (upper case) or --publish-all that will tell Docker to use random ports from your host and map them to the exposed container's ports.

-p (lower case) or --publish=[] that will tell Docker to use ports you manually set and map them to the exposed container's ports.

The second option is preferred because you already know which ports are mapped. If you use the first option then you will need to call docker inspect demo and check which random ports are being used from your host at the Ports section.

Just run the following command:

docker run -it -p 8080:8080 demo

After that your url will work.

If you are using Docker toolkit on window 10 home you will need to access the webpage through docker-machine ip command. It is generally 192.168.99.100:

It is assumed that you are running with publish command like below.

docker run -it -p 8080:8080 demo

With Window 10 pro version you can access with localhost or corresponding loopback 127.0.0.1:8080 etc (Tomcat or whatever you wish). This is because you don't have a virtual box there and docker is running directly on Window Hyper V and loopback is directly accessible.

Verify the hosts file in window for any digression. It should have 127.0.0.1 mapped to localhost

I had the same problem. I was using Docker Toolbox on Windows Home. Instead of localhost I had to use http://192.168.99.100:8080/.

You can get the correct IP address using the command:

docker-machine ip

The above command returned 192.168.99.100 for me.

In Docker Quickstart Terminal run following command:

$ docker-machine ip 192.168.99.100