COPYing a file in a Dockerfile no such file or directory

Question

I have a Dockerfile set up in my root     folder  The first three lines of my file look like this   COPY file1  root folder  COPY file2  root folder  COPY file3  root folder    but it returns the following error for each line      No such file or directory   The files are in the same directory as my Dockerfile and I am running the command docker build -  lt  Dockerfile in the same directory in terminal as well   What am I doing wrong here exactly

User · Answer

Here is the solution and the best practice:

You need to create a resources folder where you can keep all your files you want to copy.

+-- Dockerfile
+-- resources
¦     +-- file1.txt
¦     +-- file2.js

The command for copying files should be specified this way:

COPY resources /root/folder/

where

*resources - your local folder which you created in the same folder where Dockerfile is

*/root/folder/ - folder at your container

User · Answer

I feel a little stupid  but my issue was that I was running docker-compose  and my Dockerfile was in a   deploy subdirectory  My ADD reference needed to be relative to the root of the project  not the Dockerfile   Changed  ADD   file tar gz  etc folder  to  ADD   deploy file tar gz  etc folder   Anyhow  thought I d post in case someone ran into the same issue

User · Answer

Some great answers here already  What worked for me  was to move the comments to the next line  BAD  WORKDIR  tmp app src   set the working directory  WORKDIR   so we can reference program directly instead of providing the full path  COPY src   tmp app src    copy the project source code  GOOD  WORKDIR  tmp app src     set the working directory  WORKDIR   so we can reference program directly instead of providing the full path  COPY src   tmp app src      copy the project source code

User · Answer

I know this is old  but something to point out  If you think everything is as its supposed to  check your  gitignore file      You might have the folder locally  but if the folder is in your git ignore then its not on the server  which means Docker cannot find that folder as it does not exist

User · Answer

So this has happened a couple of times just recently  As a  Net dev  using VisualStudio I changed my build name from SomeThing to Something as the DLL name but this does not change the  csproj file which stays SomeThing csproj  The Dockerfile uses linux case-sensitive filenames  so the newly autogenerated Dockerfile was trying to copy Something csproj which it couldn t find  So manually renaming that file  making it lowercase  got it all working  But   here s a cautionary warning  This filename change on my Windows laptop does not get picked up by Git so the repo source was still SomeThing csproj on the repo and during the CI CD process  the Docker build failed for the same reasons     I had to change the filename directly as a commit on the repo    nasty little workaround but got me going   tl dr If on Windows O S check for filename case sensitivity and be aware local file renames do not get picked up as Git change so make sure your repo is also modified if using CI CD

User · Answer

It is possibly caused by you are referring file1 file2 file3 as an absolute path which is not in build context  Docker only search the path in build context   E g  if you use COPY  home yourname file1  Docker build interprets it as   docker build working directory  home yourname file1  if no file with same name here  no file or directory error is thrown   Refer to One of the docker issue

User · Answer

The COPY instruction in the Dockerfile copies the files in src to the dest folder  Looks like you are either missing the file1  file2 and file3 or trying to build the Dockerfile from the wrong folder    Refer Dockerfile Doc  Also the command for building the Dockerfile should be something like   cd into the folder  docker build -t sometagname

User · Answer

one of the way to don t use stdin and keep the context is   1  in your Dockerfile  you should add  ADD  your dir to copy  location in container   2  after  you should go on the parent of  your dir to copy dir  2  then run this command  sudo docker build   -t  image name  -f path of your dockerfile Dockerfile   3  after you create your container  docker run -ti --rm cordova bash   4  After you will get your directory copied in your container

User · Answer

Do check the  dockerignore file too   I know this is a very rare case  but I had that file mentioned there

User · Answer

Seems that the commands   docker build -t imagename     and    docker build -t imagename -  lt  Dockerfile2   are not executed the same way  If you want to build 2 docker images from within one folder with Dockerfile and Dockerfile2  the COPY command cannot be used in the second example using stdin   lt  Dockerfile2   Instead you have to use   docker build -t imagename -f Dockerfile2     Then COPY does work as expected

User · Answer

Running docker build   -f docker development Dockerfile worked   which allows you to run your docker file from a specified directory other than the root of your application  Use -f or --file to specify the name and location of the Dockerfile  This happened to me when trying to run the docker file from a different directory  I had the COPY failed  stat  var lib docker tmp docker-builder929708051 XXXX  no such file or directory and managed to resolve this by specifying the docker file  It was docker build docker development Dockerfile that caused this issue for me  I found it strange at first because when i had the Dockerfile in the apps root directory it worked fine  This will help if you want to manage your environment docker files a little better

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I just experienced this problem and none of the suggestions here solved my problem  Turns out I had the wrong line endings in my file  and had to change them to the appropriate line endings   In this case from CRLF to LF  so Ubuntu 14 04 would recognize the script  which I had been editing on windows    I changed the line endings using VSCode  and most code editors should have the option of choosing line endings   Hope this helps someone

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File not found error with Docker put archive   I am using the Python API for docker   Docker version 1 12 5  build 7392c3b  docker errors NotFound  404 Client Error  Not Found   lstat  var lib docker aufs mnt 39d58e00519ba4171815ee4444f3c43d2c6a7e285102747398f6788e39ee0e87 var lib neo4j certificates  no such file or directory     I am unable to copy files to a created docker container   con   cli create container      cli put archive      cli start con  Id      If I change the order of operation there is no error and the files are copied exactly to were I want them  So I know my code is working and doing what I want it to do   But its important to copy configuration files to a container before it is started  Coping the files after the start cuases the container to start with a default configuration and not the custom configuration which needs to be copied into place before the container is started  Docker claims that this issue is closed but it is still affecting my application   This works  Same code different execution order   con   cli create container      cli start con  Id    cli put archive

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I ran into this  Copying some directories didn t work  Copying files did  It turned out to be because files contained in  gitignore  not just  dockerignore  are also ignored  See  https   github com zeit now issues 790

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Previous calls on COPY may be changing the directory     COPY   server package json   server        this passes  but the dest   server is considered a file  COPY   server dist   server dist           error    server dist is not a directory   Add a trailing slash to the first call  COPY   server package json   server

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I had this problem even though my source directory was in the correct build context  Found the reason was that my source directory was a symbolic link to a location outside the build context  For example my Dockerfile contains the following  COPY dir1  tmp  If dir1 is a symbolic link the COPY command is not working in my case

User · Answer

if you are sure that you did the right thing  but docker still complains  take a look at this issue  https   github com moby moby issues 27134  I got burnt by this  and it seems like restarting docker engine service docker restart will just fix this problem

User · Answer

For following error   COPY failed  stat   lt   path   gt   no such file or directory   I got it around by restarting docker service   sudo service docker restart

User · Answer

I was searching for a fix on this and the folder i was ADD or COPY ing was not in the build folder  multiple directories above or referenced from    Moving the folder from outside the build folder into the build folder fixed my issue

User · Answer

Similar and thanks to tslegaitis s answer  after   gcloud builds submit --config cloudbuild yaml      it shows  Check the gcloud log   home USER  config gcloud logs 2020 05 24 21 12 04 NUMBERS log  to see which files and the contents of the default gcloudignore file used  see    gcloud topic gcloudignore  to learn more     Checking that log  it says that docker will use  gitignore   DATE Using default gcloudignore file    This file specifies files that are  not  uploaded to Google Cloud Platform   using gcloud  It follows the same syntax as  gitignore  with the addition of      include  directives  which insert the entries of the given  gitignore-style   file at that point           gitignore   So I fixed my  gitignore  I use it as whitelist instead  and docker copied the file    I added the answer because I have not enough reputation to comment

[docker] COPYing a file in a Dockerfile, no such file or directory?

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