Docker COPY issue - "no such file or directory"

Solution 1:

For me the directory was in the correct context, only it was included in the (hidden) .dockerignore file in the root of the project. This leads to the error message:

lstat mydir/myfile.ext: no such file or directory

Solution 2:

From the documentation :

The <src> path must be inside the context of the build; you cannot COPY ../something /something, because the first step of a docker build is to send the context directory (and subdirectories) to the docker daemon.

When you use /srv/visitor you are using an absolute path outside of the build context even if it's actually the current directory.

You better organize your build context like this :

├── /srv/visitor
│   ├── Dockerfile
│   └── resources
│       ├── visitor.json
│       ├── visitor.js

And use :

COPY resources /srv/visitor/

Note:

docker build - < Dockerfile does not have any context.

Hence use,

docker build .

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Solution 3:

For me the issue was that I was using docker build - < Dockerfile

From the documentation Note: If you build using STDIN (docker build - < somefile), there is no build context, so COPY can’t be used.

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Solution 4:

As Xavier Lucas [extremely helpful] answer has stated, you cannot use COPY or ADD from a directory outside of your build context (the folder you run "docker build" from, should be the same directory as your .Dockerfile). Even if you try to use a symlink, it will not work.

Note: This is specific to POSIX (Linux, Unix, Mac, Possibly Linux Subsystem for Windows). You may be able to do similar in Windows using JUNCTION.

cd ~/your_docker_project/
cp -al /subfolder/src_directory ./
echo "COPY src_directory /subfolder/" >> Dockerfile

Danger: Using this will make your docker project specific to the host. You almost never want to do this! Handle with care.

Application: Learning, Experimenting in a Development Environment

This did the trick for me. cp -al copies the directory structure and makes hard links for all the files. When you are done run "rm -rf ./src_directory" to remove it.

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Solution 5:

I was running into this issue and found out that I was able to add a context to the build variable in order to load my Dockerfile(s) from other directories. This allowed me to change my default Docker file structure a little more to my liking. Here is a snippet from my docker-compose.yml:

version: '3'
services:
  webserver:
    build:
      context: .
      dockerfile: ./server/Dockerfile
    ...

By adding the context I was able to define where the files should be referenced. You can reference the Docker docs here: https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/#context

Hope this helps!