Docker not saving a file created using python - Flask application - docker

Question

I created a Flask Application. This application receives a XML from a url and saves it:
response = requests.get(base_url)
with open('currencies.xml', 'wb') as file:
file.write(response.content)
When I run the application without Docker, the file currencies.xml is correctly created inside my app folder.
However, this behaviour does not occur when I use docker.
In docker I run the following commands:
docker build -t my-api-docker:latest .
docker run -p 5000:5000 my-api-docker ~/Desktop/myApiDocker # This is where I want the file to be saved: inside the main Flask folder
When I run the second command, I get:
docker: Error response from daemon: OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:345: starting container process caused "exec: \"/Users/name/Desktop/myApiDocker\": stat /Users/name/Desktop/myApiDocker: no such file or directory": unknown.
ERRO[0001] error waiting for container: context canceled
But If I run:
docker build -t my-api-docker:latest .
docker run -p 5000:5000 my-api-docker # Without specifying the PATH
I can access the website (but it is pretty useless without the file currencies.xml
Dockerfile
FROM python:3.7
RUN pip install --upgrade pip
COPY ./requirements.txt /app/requirements.txt
WORKDIR /app
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt
COPY . /app
EXPOSE 5000
CMD [ "flask", "run", "--host=0.0.0.0" ]

Answer 1

When you
docker run -p 5000:5000 my-api-docker ~/Desktop/myApiDocker
Docker interprets everything after the image name (my-api-docker) as the command to run. It runs /Users/name/Desktop/myApiDocker as a command, instead of what you have as the CMD in the Dockerfile, and when that path doesn't exist in the container, you get the error you see.
It's a little unlikely you'll be able to pass this path to your flask run command as a command-line argument. A typical way of dealing with this is by using an environment variable instead. In your code,
download_dir = os.environ.get('DOWNLOAD_DIR', '.')
currencies_xml = os.path.join(download_dir, 'currencies.xml')
with open(currencies_xml, 'wb') as file:
...
Then when you start your container, you can pass that as an environment variable with the docker run -e option. Note that this names a path inside the container; there's no particular need for this to match the path on the host.
docker run \
-p 5000:5000 \
-e DOWNLOAD_DIR=/data \
-v $HOME/Desktop/myApiDocker:/data \
my-api-docker
It's also fairly common to put an ENV statement in your Dockerfile or otherwise pick a fixed path for this, and just specify that your image's interface is that it will download the file into whatever is mounted on /data.

Answer 2

When you docker run the image, the process' context is the container's file system not your host's file system. So my-api-docker ~/Desktop/myApiDocker (attempts to) place the file in the container's (!) ~/Desktop.
Instead you need to mount one of your host's directories into the container's file system and store the file in the mounted directory.
Something like:
docker run ... \
--volume=[HOST-PATH]:[CONTAINER-PATH] \
... \
my-api-docker [CONTAINER-PATH]/thefile
The container then writes the file to [CONTAINER-PATH]/thefile but this is mapped to the host's [HOST-PATH]/thefile.
NB The values for [HOST-PATH] and [CONTAINER-PATH] must be absolute not relative paths.
You may prove this behavior to yourself using e.g. either python:3.7 or busybox:
# List my host's root
ls -l /
# List the container's root
docker run --rm busybox ls -l /
# Mount the host's /tmp into the container's /tmp
ls -l /tmp
docker run --rm --volume=/tmp:/tmp busybox ls -l /tmp
HTH!