Forward host port to docker container

Is it possible to have a Docker container access ports opened by the host? Concretely I have MongoDB and RabbitMQ running on the host and I'd like to run a process in a Docker container to listen to the queue and (optionally) write to the database.

I know I can forward a port from the container to the host (via the -p option) and have a connection to the outside world (i.e. internet) from within the Docker container but I'd like to not expose the RabbitMQ and MongoDB ports from the host to the outside world.

EDIT: some clarification:

Starting Nmap 5.21 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2013-07-22 22:39 CEST
Nmap scan report for localhost (127.0.0.1)
Host is up (0.00027s latency).
PORT     STATE SERVICE
6311/tcp open  unknown

joelkuiper@vps20528 ~ % docker run -i -t base /bin/bash
root@f043b4b235a7:/# apt-get install nmap
root@f043b4b235a7:/# nmap 172.16.42.1 -p 6311 # IP found via docker inspect -> gateway

Starting Nmap 6.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2013-07-22 20:43 UTC
Nmap scan report for 172.16.42.1
Host is up (0.000060s latency).
PORT     STATE    SERVICE
6311/tcp filtered unknown
MAC Address: E2:69:9C:11:42:65 (Unknown)

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 13.31 seconds

I had to do this trick to get any internet connection within the container: My firewall is blocking network connections from the docker container to outside

EDIT: Eventually I went with creating a custom bridge using pipework and having the services listen on the bridge IP's. I went with this approach instead of having MongoDB and RabbitMQ listen on the docker bridge because it gives more flexibility.

Solution

Your docker host exposes an adapter to all the containers. Assuming you are on recent ubuntu, you can run

ip addr

This will give you a list of network adapters, one of which will look something like

3: docker0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc noqueue state UP
link/ether 22:23:6b:28:6b:e0 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
inet 172.17.42.1/16 scope global docker0
inet6 fe80::a402:65ff:fe86:bba6/64 scope link
   valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

You will need to tell rabbit/mongo to bind to that IP (172.17.42.1). After that, you should be able to open connections to 172.17.42.1 from within your containers.