Thursday, July 5, 2018

What is happening when using ../ with docker-compose volume

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I am having problems with writing files out from inside a docker container to my host computer. I believe this is a privilege issue and prefer not to set privileged: True. A work around for writing out files is by pre-pending ../ to a volume in my docker-compose.yml file. For example,

version: '3' services:     example:         volumes:          - ../:/example 

What exactly is ../ doing here? Is it taking from the container's privileges and "going up" a directory to the host machine? Without ../, I am unable to write out files to my host machine.

2 Answers

Answers 1

The statement volumes: ['../:/example'] makes the parent directory of the directory containing docker-compose.yml on the host (../) visible inside the container at /example. Host directory bind-mounts like this, plus some equivalent constructs using a named volume attached to a specific host directory, are the only way a container can write out to the host filesystem.

Answers 2

The docker build command can only access the directory it is in and lower, not higher, unless you specify the higher directory as the context.

To run the docker build from the parent directory:

docker build -f /home/me myapp/Dockerfile  

Doing the same in composer:

 #docker-compose.yml  version: '3.3'      services:    yourservice:      build:        context: /home/me        dockerfile: myapp/Dockerfile 

Or with your example:

 version: '3'  services:      build:          context: /home/me/app         dockerfile: docker/Dockerfile      example:         volumes:           - /home/me/app:/example 

Additionally you have to supply full paths, not relative paths. Ie.

- /home/me/myapp/files/example:/example  

If you have a script that is generating the Dockerfile from an unknown path, you can use:

CWD=`pwd`; echo $CWD 

To refer to the current working directory. From there you can append ..

Alternately you can build the image from a directory one up, or use a volume which you can share with an image that is run from a higher directory, or you need to output your file to stdout and redirect the output of the command to the file you need from the script that runs it.

See also: Docker: adding a file from a parent directory

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