Hello, just joined the community and looking for some help. I am evaluating Pants for use with docker builds. I am having an issue setting the correct build context. The COPY command is not copying the correct files. To share some context, my folder structure is root/<project_name>/BUILD. I am running

pants package ::

from the root folder. What should the correct context_root be set to, if I want it to be the <project_name> folder.. I feel like I have tried all variations but no success. Variations tried • context_root=“./” • context_root=“.” • context_root=“<project_name>/”

Hi and welcome. 👋 what error message do you get? If you have a

root/<proj>/Dockerfile

with a

COPY my_file /some/where

and a

root/<proj>/BUILD

with a

docker_image(context_root=".")

target defined that depends on

root/<proj>/my_file

that should work.

This is my docker file, it complains that it cannot find the requirements.txt file, which is in the project_name

And what does your BUILD file look like?

ok, yea, so with no dependencies, the context will be empty, besides the

Dockerfile

.

Thank you, I think that addresses my concerns

Great. And do come back if you get more questions 😉

@curved-television-6568 - I think I need some more help on this. I am attempting to copy all the files in the project directory to the build dependency using

dependecies

and

files

but am not getting anywhere. I am assuming if I do this, then I dont need

COPY . .

in my Dockerfile?

yes, you still need the

COPY

in the

Dockerfile

. There’s four layers to this cake. (A) the source repository, (B) the pants execution sandbox, (C) the docker build context and (D) the docker image. Your files start out their lives in A, you need a dependency on them from your

docker_image

target in order for them to be included into B, the docker build context is always rooted somewhere in the pants execution sandbox and any files in there (except any ignored by a

.dockerignore

file) will be sent to the docker daemon as the build context, C. Then during your docker build process, when the instructions in your

Dockerfile

is executed any files you want in your image D from the context C needs to be `COPY`’d over as usual.

Makes sense. When I run with option

--keep-sandboxes=always

- where on my local system do I find the sandbox. I would like to take a peek

those paths will be logged to stdout during the run

Seen it.. Thanks