Copying files from Docker container to host

Question

I\'m thinking of using Docker to build my dependencies on a Continuous Integration (CI) server, so that I don\'t have to install all the runtimes and libraries on the agents

Answer 1

In order to copy a file from a container to the host, you can use the command

docker cp <containerId>:/file/path/within/container /host/path/target

Here's an example:

$ sudo docker cp goofy_roentgen:/out_read.jpg .

Here goofy_roentgen is the container name I got from the following command:

$ sudo docker ps

CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND             CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                                            NAMES
1b4ad9311e93        bamos/openface      "/bin/bash"         33 minutes ago      Up 33 minutes       0.0.0.0:8000->8000/tcp, 0.0.0.0:9000->9000/tcp   goofy_roentgen

You can also use (part of) the Container ID. The following command is equivalent to the first

$ sudo docker cp 1b4a:/out_read.jpg .

Answer 2

docker run -dit --rm IMAGE
docker cp CONTAINER:SRC_PATH DEST_PATH

https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/run/ https://docs.docker.com/engine/reference/commandline/cp/

Answer 3

Mount a volume, copy the artifacts, adjust owner id and group id:

mkdir artifacts
docker run -i --rm -v ${PWD}/artifacts:/mnt/artifacts centos:6 /bin/bash << COMMANDS
ls -la > /mnt/artifacts/ls.txt
echo Changing owner from \$(id -u):\$(id -g) to $(id -u):$(id -g)
chown -R $(id -u):$(id -g) /mnt/artifacts
COMMANDS

EDIT: Note that some of the commands like $(id -u) are backslashed and will therefore be processed within the container, while the ones that are not backslashed will be processed by the shell being run in the host machine BEFORE the commands are sent to the container.

Answer 4

With the release of Docker 19.03, you can skip creating the container and even building an image. There's an option with BuildKit based builds to change the output destination. You can use this to write the results of the build to your local directory rather than into an image. E.g. here's a build of a go binary:

$ ls
Dockerfile  go.mod  main.go

$ cat Dockerfile
FROM golang:1.12-alpine as dev
RUN apk add --no-cache git ca-certificates
RUN adduser -D appuser
WORKDIR /src
COPY . /src/
CMD CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -o app . && ./app

FROM dev as build
RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -o app .
USER appuser
CMD [ "./app" ]

FROM scratch as release
COPY --from=build /etc/passwd /etc/group /etc/
COPY --from=build /src/app /app
USER appuser
CMD [ "/app" ]

FROM scratch as artifact
COPY --from=build /src/app /app

FROM release

From the above Dockerfile, I'm building the artifact stage that only includes the files I want to export. And the newly introduced --output flag lets me write those to a local directory instead of an image. This needs to be performed with the BuildKit engine that ships with 19.03:

$ DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 docker build --target artifact --output type=local,dest=. .
[+] Building 43.5s (12/12) FINISHED
 => [internal] load build definition from Dockerfile                                                                              0.7s
 => => transferring dockerfile: 572B                                                                                              0.0s
 => [internal] load .dockerignore                                                                                                 0.5s
 => => transferring context: 2B                                                                                                   0.0s
 => [internal] load metadata for docker.io/library/golang:1.12-alpine                                                             0.9s
 => [dev 1/5] FROM docker.io/library/golang:1.12-alpine@sha256:50deab916cce57a792cd88af3479d127a9ec571692a1a9c22109532c0d0499a0  22.5s
 => => resolve docker.io/library/golang:1.12-alpine@sha256:50deab916cce57a792cd88af3479d127a9ec571692a1a9c22109532c0d0499a0       0.0s
 => => sha256:1ec62c064901392a6722bb47a377c01a381f4482b1ce094b6d28682b6b6279fd 155B / 155B                                        0.3s
 => => sha256:50deab916cce57a792cd88af3479d127a9ec571692a1a9c22109532c0d0499a0 1.65kB / 1.65kB                                    0.0s
 => => sha256:2ecd820bec717ec5a8cdc2a1ae04887ed9b46c996f515abc481cac43a12628da 1.36kB / 1.36kB                                    0.0s
 => => sha256:6a17089e5a3afc489e5b6c118cd46eda66b2d5361f309d8d4b0dcac268a47b13 3.81kB / 3.81kB                                    0.0s
 => => sha256:89d9c30c1d48bac627e5c6cb0d1ed1eec28e7dbdfbcc04712e4c79c0f83faf17 2.79MB / 2.79MB                                    0.6s
 => => sha256:8ef94372a977c02d425f12c8cbda5416e372b7a869a6c2b20342c589dba3eae5 301.72kB / 301.72kB                                0.4s
 => => sha256:025f14a3d97f92c07a07446e7ea8933b86068d00da9e252cf3277e9347b6fe69 125.33MB / 125.33MB                               13.7s
 => => sha256:7047deb9704134ff71c99791be3f6474bb45bc3971dde9257ef9186d7cb156db 125B / 125B                                        0.8s
 => => extracting sha256:89d9c30c1d48bac627e5c6cb0d1ed1eec28e7dbdfbcc04712e4c79c0f83faf17                                         0.2s
 => => extracting sha256:8ef94372a977c02d425f12c8cbda5416e372b7a869a6c2b20342c589dba3eae5                                         0.1s
 => => extracting sha256:1ec62c064901392a6722bb47a377c01a381f4482b1ce094b6d28682b6b6279fd                                         0.0s
 => => extracting sha256:025f14a3d97f92c07a07446e7ea8933b86068d00da9e252cf3277e9347b6fe69                                         5.2s
 => => extracting sha256:7047deb9704134ff71c99791be3f6474bb45bc3971dde9257ef9186d7cb156db                                         0.0s
 => [internal] load build context                                                                                                 0.3s
 => => transferring context: 2.11kB                                                                                               0.0s
 => [dev 2/5] RUN apk add --no-cache git ca-certificates                                                                          3.8s
 => [dev 3/5] RUN adduser -D appuser                                                                                              1.7s
 => [dev 4/5] WORKDIR /src                                                                                                        0.5s
 => [dev 5/5] COPY . /src/                                                                                                        0.4s
 => [build 1/1] RUN CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -o app .                                                                              11.6s
 => [artifact 1/1] COPY --from=build /src/app /app                                                                                0.5s
 => exporting to client                                                                                                           0.1s
 => => copying files 10.00MB                                                                                                      0.1s

After the build was complete the app binary was exported:

$ ls
Dockerfile  app  go.mod  main.go

$ ./app
Ready to receive requests on port 8080

Docker has other options to the --output flag documented in their upstream BuildKit repo: https://github.com/moby/buildkit#output

Answer 5

You do not need to use docker run.

You can do it with docker create.

From the docs:

The docker create command creates a writeable container layer over the specified image and prepares it for running the specified command. The container ID is then printed to STDOUT. This is similar to docker run -d except the container is never started.

So, you can do:

docker create -ti --name dummy IMAGE_NAME bash
docker cp dummy:/path/to/file /dest/to/file
docker rm -f dummy

Here, you never start the container. That looked beneficial to me.

Answer 6

I used PowerShell (Admin) with this command.

docker cp {container id}:{container path}/error.html  C:\\error.html

Example

docker cp ff3a6608467d:/var/www/app/error.html  C:\\error.html