Docker mount windows folder to container

Here’s an example with a Windows path:

docker run -P -it --name organizr --mount src="/c/Users/MyUserName/AppData/Roaming/DockerConfigs/Organizr",dst=/config,type=bind organizrtools/organizr-v2:latest

As a side note, during all of this hair pulling, having to wrestle with figuring out, and retyping paths over and over and over again, I decided to whip up a small AutoHotkey script to convert a Windows path to a «Docker Windows» formatted path. This way all I have to do is copy any Windows path that I want to use as a mount point to the clipboard, press the «Apps Key» on the keyboard, and it’ll format it into a path format that Docker appreciates.

For example:

Copy this to your clipboard:

C:UsersMy PCAppDataRoamingDockerConfigsOrganizr

press the Apps Key while the cursor is where you want it on the command-line, and it’ll paste this there:

"/c/Users/My PC/AppData/Roaming/DockerConfigs/Organizr"

Saves a lot to time for me. Here it is for anyone else who may find it useful.

; --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
;
; Docker Utility: Convert a Windows Formatted Path to a Docker Formatter Path
;                   Useful for (example) when mounting Windows volumes via the command-line.
;
; By:       J. Scott Elblein
; Version:  1.0
; Date:     2/5/2019
;
; Usage:    Cut or Copy the Windows formatted path to the clipboard, press the AppsKey on your keyboard
;           (usually right next to the Windows Key), it'll format it into a 'docker path' and enter it
;           into the active window. Easy example usage would be to copy your intended volume path via
;           Explorer, place the cursor after the "-v" in your Docker command, press the Apps Key and
;           then it'll place the formatted path onto the line for you.
;
; TODO::    I may or may not add anything to this depending on needs. Some ideas are:
;           
;           - Add a tray menu with the ability to do some things, like just replace the unformatted path
;               on the clipboard with the formatted one rather than enter it automatically.
;           - Add 'smarter' handling so the it first confirms that the clipboard text is even a path in
;               the first place. (would need to be able to handle Win + Mac + Linux)
;           - Add command-line handling so the script doesn't need to always be in the tray, you could
;               just pass the Windows path to the script, have it format it, then paste and close.
;               Also, could have it just check for a path on the clipboard upon script startup, if found
;               do it's job, then exit the script.
;           - Add an 'all-in-one' action, to copy the selected Windows path, and then output the result.
;           - Whatever else comes to mind.
;
; --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#NoEnv
SendMode Input
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%

AppsKey::

    ; Create a new var, store the current clipboard contents (should be a Windows path)
    NewStr := Clipboard

    ; Rip out the first 2 chars (should be a drive letter and colon) & convert the letter to lowercase
    ; NOTE: I could probably replace the following 3 lines with a regexreplace, but atm I'm lazy and in a rush.
    tmpVar := SubStr(NewStr, 1, 2)
    StringLower, tmpVar, tmpVar

    ; Replace the uppercase drive letter and colon with the lowercase drive letter and colon
    NewStr := StrReplace(NewStr, SubStr(NewStr, 1, 2), tmpVar)

    ; Replace backslashes with forward slashes
    NewStr := StrReplace(NewStr,  "", "/")

    ; Replace all colons with nothing
    NewStr := StrReplace(NewStr, ":", "")

    ; Remove the last char if it's a trailing forward slash
    NewStr :=  RegExReplace(NewStr, "/$")

    ; Append a leading forward slash if not already there
    if RegExMatch(NewStr, "^/") == 0
        NewStr :=  "/" . NewStr

    ; If there are any spaces in the path ... wrap in double quotes
    if RegExMatch(NewStr, " ") > 0
        NewStr :=  """" . NewStr . """"

    ; Send the result to the active window
    SendInput % NewStr 

How to mount a volume from Windows host to Windows guest system?

I am on Windows Server 2016 TP4 using Docker.

Following the documentation on
https://docs.docker.com/engine/userguide/containers/dockervolumes/

If you are using Docker Machine on Mac or Windows, your Docker daemon
has only limited access to your OS X or Windows filesystem. Docker
Machine tries to auto-share your /Users (OS X) or C:Users (Windows)
directory. So, you can mount files or directories on OS X using.

On Windows, mount directories using:

docker run -v /c/Users/[path]:/[container path] …`

I tried:

docker run --name iisdemo2 -it -p 80:80 -v /c/Users/mlin/meinedaten:/meinedaten iis cmd

which gives me an error:

docker : docker: Error response from daemon: Invalid bind mount spec "/c/Users/mlin/meinedaten:/meinedaten": volumeinvalid: Invalid volume specification: 
'/c/Users/mlin/meinedaten:/meinedaten'.

I also tried:

docker run --name iisdemo2 -it -p 80:80 -v /c/Users/mlin/meinedaten:/c/meinedaten iis cmd

Note that the path C:meinedaten on the guest/container exist already, which is required according to the docker documentation.

The command looks correct to me according to the documentation.

(Mounting volumes from Mac OS X host to Ubuntu docker container works fine, I am just having problems with Windows.)

Update

I also just tried to use Windows Containers natively (via Powershell), not using Docker. I follow the documentation on https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/windowscontainers/quick_start/manage_powershell#create-a-shared-folder.

Add-ContainerSharedFolder -ContainerName mysql2 -SourcePath C:Usersmlinmeinedaten -DestinationPath C:meinedaten

But I am getting problems there are as well.

Eventually related topics:

• https://github.com/docker/docker/issues/12751
• https://github.com/testcontainers/testcontainers-java/issues/84
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36053968/mount-volume-to-host

Docker for Windows makes it super easy to get an IIS server up and running (if you’ve not tried Docker for Windows yet, check out my getting started guide). With the following PowerShell commands, we can get an IIS container running, discover it’s IP address, and launch it in a browser:

docker run -d -p 80 --name datatest1 microsoft/iis:nanoserver
$ip = docker inspect -f "{{.NetworkSettings.Networks.nat.IPAddress}}" datatest1
Start-Process -FilePath [http://$ip](http://$ip)

And we can see that our IIS instance is indeed up and running:

But how can we get our own HTML files into our container? Well, Docker gives us a variety of techniques. Let’s look at four.

Technique 1: Edit in the Container

The first technique is the least practical, but demonstrates a very powerful feature of Docker containers. We are not limited to running just one process in them. So while our datatest1 container is running IIS, we can also run PowerShell in it like this:

docker exec -it datatest1 powershell

This gives us an interactive command prompt inside our container.

So we can create our own index.html file in there:

echo "<html><body><h1>Hello World</h1></body></html>" > "c:inetpubwwwrootindex.html"
exit

If we refresh our browser, we can see our edit has worked:

Now clearly this would not be a practical way to construct a website, but it does demonstrate that you can connect into a running container and make any changes you need. This is a technique you might use while experimenting with a container, with a view to scripting your manual changes in a dockerfile (see technique 4 below) later.

Technique 2: Copy into a Container

The second technique is to use the docker cp command. This allows you to copy files locally into a container. So I made a local index.html file which I attempted to copy into my datatest1 container

docker cp index.html datatest1:c:inetpubwwwroot

But this fails with an error saying the file is in use. In fact, I couldn’t manage to copy any file anywhere while the container was running. I don’t know whether this is a limitation with Windows containers, or if there is a way to get this working, but it does at least work while the container is stopped. Unfortunately this will mean the container will also get a new IP address.

docker stop datatest1
docker cp index.html datatest1:c:inetpubwwwroot
docker start datatest1
$ip = docker inspect -f "{{.NetworkSettings.Networks.nat.IPAddress}}" datatest1
Start-Process -FilePath [http://$ip](http://$ip)

If instead of copying a single file, we want to copy the contents of a whole local folder called site into wwwroot, then I couldn’t find the right syntax to do this directly with docker cp, so I ended up changing local directory before performing the copy:

docker stop datatest1
push-location ./site
docker cp . datatest1:c:/inetpub/wwwroot
pop-location
docker start datatest1
$ip = docker inspect -f "{{.NetworkSettings.Networks.nat.IPAddress}}" datatest1
Start-Process -FilePath [http://$ip](http://$ip)

So while docker cp is a useful command to know, it still isn’t the smoothest experience.

Technique 3: Mount a Volume

This next technique is a really nice feature of Docker. Rather than transferring our data into the container, we can make a folder on our local machine visible inside the container by mounting a volume.

We do this with the -v switch on the docker run command, specifying the local folder we want to mount, and the location in which it should appear on the container.

There were a couple of quirks I ran into. First of all, the local path needs to be absolute, not relative, so I’m using Get-Location to get the current directory. And secondly, you can’t mount a volume on top of an existing folder (at least in Docker for Windows). So we sadly can’t overwrite wwwroot using this technique. But we could mount into a subfolder under wwwroot like this:

docker run -d -p 80 -v "$((Get-Location).Path)site:c:inetpubwwwrootsite" --name datatest2 microsoft/iis:nanoserver

And we can see the results in a browser with a similar technique to before:

$ip = docker inspect -f "{{.NetworkSettings.Networks.nat.IPAddress}}" datatest2
Start-Process -FilePath [http://$ip/site](http://$ip/site)

Now the great thing is that we can simply modify our local HTML and refresh the browser and our changes are immediately visible.

So volumes are a really powerful technique, and really come into their own when your container needs to store data that needs to live beyond the lifetime of the container.

But there’s one final technique we need to consider for getting our HTML into our container, and that’s using a dockerfile.

Technique 4: Use a Dockerfile

While volumes are great for data, if you’re planning on deploying your website, you probably do want to bake the HTML into the container image directly. And that can be done by creating your own dockerfile. This is about the simplest sort of dockerfile you can create:

FROM microsoft/iis:nanoserver
COPY site C:/inetpub/wwwroot

All this dockerfile is saying is that our base image is the Microsoft IIS nanoserver image from DockerHub, and then we want to copy the contents of our local site directory into C:/inetpub/wwwroot.

With our dockerfile in place, we need to build an image with the docker build command, giving it a name (I chose datatest4:v1), and then we can create a container from that image with docker run, just as we did before.

docker build -t datatest4:v1 .
docker run -d -p 80 --name datatest4 datatest4:v1
$ip = docker inspect -f "{{.NetworkSettings.Networks.nat.IPAddress}}" datatest4
Start-Process -FilePath [http://$ip](http://$ip)

The great thing about this approach is that now we have an image of our website that we can deploy anywhere.