- Yes, you can copy files from host to container and from container to host.
- The docker cp utility copies the contents of source to the destination.
- You can copy from the container’s file system to the local machine or the reverse, from the local filesystem to the container.
- Localhost –> Container
docker cp <path of local host> containerid:<path of container>
- Container –> Localhost
docker cp containerid:<path of container><path of local host>
- Let us see this in action by this simple example of running a docker image of an Apache HTTP Server.
- I have a simple index.html page, which i will copy to the /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/ path of HTTP Server.
- Contents of index.html
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Docker cp utility</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is a simple web page <strong>Use strong tag to appear bold</strong> , just like this <strong>p</strong> tag and its contents.</p>
</body>
</html>- Dockerfile
FROM httpd:2.4
COPY website/ /usr/local/apache2/htdocs/- i have index.html in the website folder. This is how my directory structure looks
- Let us now issue the command to run the container
docker build -t apache-docker-example .
- Once the container starts, you can visit the web page on a browser by typing :
http://localhost
- Next let us make a change to the index.html in our local by adding a span tag
<!doctype html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Docker cp utility</title>
</head>
<body>
<p>This is a simple web page <strong><span style="color: red">Use strong tag to appear bold</span></strong> , just like this <strong>p</strong> tag and its contents.</p>
</body>
</html>- To copy this file from the host to the container, first get the container id
- Now run the command :
docker cp website/index.html 69a71ef9197a:/usr/local/apache2/htdocs/ - If you refresh the webpage, you will see that the changes have been copied and webpage looks like this
- Next, let us copy contents from the container to the host. We will copy the logs folder from Apache server to local host.
docker cp 69a71ef9197a:/usr/local/apache2/logs /Users/rajeshp/docker/apache- After the above command , if you look at the path , you will see the log folder have been copied from container to host
Thank you !!
As always easy language and helpful. 🙂
🙏🙏🤗