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NATS

What is NATS?​

NATS is a lightweight, high-performance messaging system for cloud-native and microservice architectures, used for pub/sub, request/reply, and simple queueing. Laradock runs the official nats image with its own config file baked in.

Start NATS​

docker compose up -d nats

Stop NATS​

docker compose stop nats

This stops the container. NATS in this setup keeps no persistent data volume, so there's nothing to preserve or lose: docker compose rm -f nats removes the container entirely.

Configuration​

All settings live in nats/defaults.env and can be overridden by adding the same line to your own .env:

VariableDefaultWhat it does
NATS_CLIENT_PORT4222Host-side port for client connections.
NATS_MONITORING_PORT6222Host-side port for the clustering route port (mapped from the container's 6222).
NATS_ROUTE_PORT8222Host-side port for the HTTP monitoring endpoint (mapped from the container's 8222).

The container's own nats-server.conf (baked into the image via nats/Dockerfile) sets the client port to 4222, the HTTP monitoring port to 8222, and a cluster block on port 6222 for connecting multiple NATS servers together. Note the naming in defaults.env doesn't line up 1:1 with what each port actually does inside the container: NATS_MONITORING_PORT maps to the container's clustering port 6222, and NATS_ROUTE_PORT maps to the container's HTTP monitoring port 8222. Double-check nats/compose.yml if you rely on a specific one.

Connect from your app​

Inside Laradock, other containers reach NATS by container name and its internal client port: nats:4222. From your host machine, connect to localhost:4222 (or your custom NATS_CLIENT_PORT) with any NATS client library.

Check server health​

The HTTP monitoring endpoint (container port 8222, published on NATS_ROUTE_PORT by default) serves NATS's built-in monitoring JSON:

curl http://localhost:8222/varz

Common issues​

  • Port already in use on your host. Another local NATS instance (or another Laradock project) is already bound to one of the default ports. Change the relevant NATS_*_PORT variable in .env and restart: docker compose up -d nats.
  • Monitoring/route ports feel swapped. As noted above, NATS_MONITORING_PORT and NATS_ROUTE_PORT don't map to the container ports their names imply; check nats/compose.yml and nats/nats-server.conf directly if a specific port matters to you.
  • Clustering doesn't work out of the box. nats-server.conf ships with an empty routes = [] list; clustering to other NATS servers needs to be configured manually per the NATS clustering docs.
  • Config changes don't take effect. nats-server.conf is copied into the image at build time, so a plain restart won't pick up edits: docker compose build nats && docker compose up -d nats.

Need a message queue with a management UI instead? See RabbitMQ. New to Laradock? Start at Getting Started.