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

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