How to list files in a stopped Docker container - docker

This question shows how to copy files out of a stopped container. This requires that I know the full path to the file including its file name. I know the directory I want to copy a file out of, but I do not know its file name since that is generated dynamically. How do I list the files in a directory in a stopped Docker container?
The following Docker command works great if the Docker container is running. But, it fails if the Docker container is stopped.
docker exec --privileged MyContainer ls -1 /var/log
Note: The files are not stored in a persistent volume.

This answer to another question shows how to start a stopped container with another command. Here are the commands to list files in a stopped container.
Commit the stopped container to a new image: test_image.
docker commit $CONTAINER_ID test_image
Run the new image in a new container with a shell.
docker run -ti --entrypoint=sh test_image
Run the list file command in the new container.
docker exec --privileged $NEW_CONTAINER_ID ls -1 /var/log

When starting the container is not an option, you can always export your image (a bit overkill but..) and list its contents:
docker export -o dump.tar <container id>
tar -tvf dump.tar
Reference: Baeldung - Exploring a Docker Container’s Filesystem

The command docker diff *CONTAINER* will list the files added, deleted and changed since the Container started.
If a file did not change since the container was started, then you would have to know the contents of the original image that started the container. So, this answer is not ideal but avoids creating an image and running it.
Unlike container-diff, this command does not require first creating a Docker image.

If you want to see a certain file content, I would suggest using docker container cp command. Here is the doc. It works on stopped container. Example:
docker container cp 02b1ef7de80a:/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf ./
This way I got the config file that was generated by templating engine during start.

Try using container-diff with the --type=file option. This will compare two images and report the files added, deleted and modified.
If a file did not change since the container was started, then you would have to know the contents of the original image that started the container. So, this answer is not ideal but avoids creating an image and running it.
This tool requires that you first create an image of the stopped Docker container with docker commit.
Here is the command to install it:
curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/container-diff/latest/container-diff-linux-amd64 \
&& chmod +x container-diff-linux-amd64 \
&& mkdir -p $HOME/bin \
&& export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin \
&& mv container-diff-linux-amd64 $HOME/bin/container-diff
Here is the command to use the utility:
container-diff analyze $IMAGE --type=file

docker container cp <STOPPED_CONTAINER_ID>:<PATH_TO_FILE> -
Notice the "-" at the end of the command.
It actually "copies" the specified file from the stopped container into "stdout". In other words, it just prints the file contents.
Thanks #azat-khadiev for your direction (I don't know why you got "-1 for that answer...)

Related

Explore content of files of nginx container on my host machine [duplicate]

I did a docker pull and can list the image that's downloaded. I want to see the contents of this image. Did a search on the net but no straight answer.
If the image contains a shell, you can run an interactive shell container using that image and explore whatever content that image has. If sh is not available, the busybox ash shell might be.
For instance:
docker run -it image_name sh
Or following for images with an entrypoint
docker run -it --entrypoint sh image_name
Or if you want to see how the image was built, meaning the steps in its Dockerfile, you can:
docker image history --no-trunc image_name > image_history
The steps will be logged into the image_history file.
You should not start a container just to see the image contents. For instance, you might want to look for malicious content, not run it. Use "create" instead of "run";
docker create --name="tmp_$$" image:tag
docker export tmp_$$ | tar t
docker rm tmp_$$
The accepted answer here is problematic, because there is no guarantee that an image will have any sort of interactive shell. For example, the drone/drone image contains on a single command /drone, and it has an ENTRYPOINT as well, so this will fail:
$ docker run -it drone/drone sh
FATA[0000] DRONE_HOST is not properly configured
And this will fail:
$ docker run --rm -it --entrypoint sh drone/drone
docker: Error response from daemon: oci runtime error: container_linux.go:247: starting container process caused "exec: \"sh\": executable file not found in $PATH".
This is not an uncommon configuration; many minimal images contain only the binaries necessary to support the target service. Fortunately, there are mechanisms for exploring an image filesystem that do not depend on the contents of the image. The easiest is probably the docker export command, which will export a container filesystem as a tar archive. So, start a container (it does not matter if it fails or not):
$ docker run -it drone/drone sh
FATA[0000] DRONE_HOST is not properly configured
Then use docker export to export the filesystem to tar:
$ docker export $(docker ps -lq) | tar tf -
The docker ps -lq there means "give me the id of the most recent docker container". You could replace that with an explicit container name or id.
docker save nginx > nginx.tar
tar -xvf nginx.tar
Following files are present:
manifest.json – Describes filesystem layers and name of json file that has the Container properties.
.json – Container properties
– Each “layerid” directory contains json file describing layer property and filesystem associated with that layer. Docker stores Container images as layers to optimize storage space by reusing layers across images.
https://sreeninet.wordpress.com/2016/06/11/looking-inside-container-images/
OR
you can use dive to view the image content interactively with TUI
https://github.com/wagoodman/dive
EXPLORING DOCKER IMAGE!
Figure out what kind of shell is in there bash or sh...
Inspect the image first: docker inspect name-of-container-or-image
Look for entrypoint or cmd in the JSON return.
Then do: docker run --rm -it --entrypoint=/bin/bash name-of-image
once inside do: ls -lsa or any other shell command like: cd ..
The -it stands for interactive... and TTY. The --rm stands for remove container after run.
If there are no common tools like ls or bash present and you have access to the Dockerfile simple add the common tool as a layer.
example (alpine Linux):
RUN apk add --no-cache bash
And when you don't have access to the Dockerfile then just copy/extract the files from a newly created container and look through them:
docker create <image> # returns container ID the container is never started.
docker cp <container ID>:<source_path> <destination_path>
docker rm <container ID>
cd <destination_path> && ls -lsah
To list the detailed content of an image you have to run docker run --rm image/name ls -alR where --rm means remove as soon as exits form a container.
If you want to list the files in an image without starting a container :
docker create --name listfiles <image name>
docker export listfiles | tar -t
docker rm listfiles
We can try a simpler one as follows:
docker image inspect image_id
This worked in Docker version:
DockerVersion": "18.05.0-ce"
if you want to check the image contents without running it you can do this:
$ sudo bash
...
$ cd /var/lib/docker # default path in most installations
$ find . -iname a_file_inside_the_image.ext
... (will find the base path here)
This works fine with the current default BTRFS storage driver.
Oneliner, no docker run (based on responses above)
IMAGE=your_image docker create --name filelist $IMAGE command && docker export filelist | tar tf - | tree --fromfile . && docker rm filelist
Same, but report tree structure to result.txt
IMAGE=your_image docker create --name filelist $IMAGE command && docker export filelist | tar tf - | tree --noreport --fromfile . | tee result.txt && docker rm filelist
I tried this tool - https://github.com/wagoodman/dive
I found it quite helpful to explore the content of the docker image.
Perhaps this is nota very straight forward approach but this one worked for me.
I had an ECR Repo (Amazon Container Service Repository) whose code i wanted to see.
First we need to save the repo you want to access as a tar file. In my case the command went like - docker save .dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/<name_of_repo>:image-tag > saved-repo.tar
UNTAR the file using the command - tar -xvf saved-repo.tar. You could see many folders and files
Now try to find the file which contain the code you are looking for (if you know some part of the code)
Command for searching the file - grep -iRl "string you want to search" ./
This will make you reach the file. It can happen that even that file is tarred, so untar it using the command mentioned in step 2.
If you dont know the code you are searching for, you will need to go through all the files that you got after step 2 and this can be bit tiring.
All the Best !
There is a free open source tool called Anchore-CLI that you can use to scan container images. This command will allow you to list all files in a container image
anchore-cli image content myrepo/app:latest files
https://anchore.com/opensource/
EDIT: not available from anchore.com anymore, It's a python program you can install from https://github.com/anchore/anchore-cli
With Docker EE for Windows (17.06.2-ee-6 on Hyper-V Server 2016) all contents of Windows Containers can be examined at C:\ProgramData\docker\windowsfilter\ path of the host OS.
No special mounting needed.
Folder prefix can be found by container id from docker ps -a output.

Copying a file from container to locally by using volume mounts

Trying to copy files from the container to the local first
So, I have a custom Dockerfile, RUN mkdir /test1 && touch /test1/1.txt and then I build my image and I have created an empty folder in local path /root/test1
and docker run -d --name container1 -v /root/test1:/test1 Image:1
I tried to copy files from containers to the local folder, and I wanted to use it later on. but it is taking my local folder as a preceding and making my container empty.
Could you please someone help me here?
For example, I have built my own custom Jenkins file, for the first time while launching it I need to copy all the configurations and changes locally from the container, and later if wanted to delete my container and launch it again don't need to configure from the scratch.
Thanks,
The relatively new --mount flag replaces the -v/--volume mount. It's easier to understand (syntactically) and is also more verbose (see https://docs.docker.com/storage/volumes/).
You can mount and copy with:
docker run -i \
--rm \
--mount type=bind,source="$(pwd)"/root/test1,target=/test1 \
/bin/bash << COMMANDS
cp <files> /test1
COMMANDS
where you need to adjust the cp command to your needs. I'm not sure if you need the "$(pwd)" part.
Off the top, without testing to confirm, i think it is
docker cp container1:/path/on/container/filename /path/on/hostmachine/
EDIT: Yes that should work. Also "container1" is used here because that was the container's name provided in the example
In general it works like this
container to host
docker cp containername:/containerpath/ /hostpath/
host to container
docker cp /hostpath/ containername:/containerpath/

How to 'docker exec' a container built from scratch?

I am trying to docker exec a container that is built from scratch (say, a NATS container). Seems pretty straight-forward, but since it is built from scratch, I am unable to access /bin/bash, /bin/sh and literally any such command.
I get the error: oci runtime error (command not found, file not found, etc. depending upon the command that I enter).
I tried some commands like:
docker exec -it <container name> /bin/bash
docker exec -it <container name> /bin/sh
docker exec -it <container name> ls
My question is, how do I docker exec a container that is built from scratch and consisting only of binaries? By doing a docker exec, I wish to find out if the files have been successfully copied from my host to the container (I have a COPY in the Dockerfile).
If your scratch container is running you can copy a shell (and other needed utils) into its filesystem and then exec it. The shell would need to be a static binary. Busybox is a great choice here because it can double as so many other binaries.
Full example:
# Assumes scratch container is last launched one, else replace with container ID of
# scratch image, e.g. from `docker ps`, for example:
# scratch_container_id=401b31621b36
scratch_container_id=$(docker ps -ql)
docker run -d busybox:latest sleep 100
busybox_container_id=$(docker ps -ql)
docker cp "$busybox_container_id":/bin/busybox .
# The busybox binary will become whatever you name it (or the first arg you pass to it), for more info run:
# docker run busybox:latest /bin/busybox
# The `busybox --install` command copies the binary with different names into a directory.
docker cp ./busybox "$scratch_container_id":/busybox
docker exec -it "$scratch_container_id" /busybox sh -c '
export PATH="/busybin:$PATH"
/busybox mkdir /busybin
/busybox --install /busybin
sh'
For Kubernetes I think Ephemeral Containers provide or will provide equivalent functionality.
References:
distroless java docker image error
https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/issues/168#issuecomment-371077961
There are several options.
You can do docker container cp ${CONTAINER}:/path/to/file/on/container /path/to/temp/dir/on/host. This will copy the files to your host where you can inspect things using host tools.
You can add an appropriate VOLUME to your Dockerfile. Then you can docker container inspect ${CONTAINER}. This will expose the volume name where the files should be. You can then inspect those in another container (based off an image with all the tools you need).
You can at runtime bind the container to a volume or host directory at the appropriate place.
You can add those binaries that you feel you need to the image. If you need /bin/ls or /bin/sh, then you can add them.
You can bind mount the necessary binaries to the container - so the container has them for verification purposes but the image is not bloated by them.
You can only use docker exec to run commands that actually exist in a container. If those commands don't exist, you can't run them. As you've noted, the scratch base image contains nothing – no shells, no libraries, no system files, nothing.
If all you're trying to check is if a Dockerfile COPY command actually copied the files you said it would, I'd generally assume the tooling works and just reference the copied files in my application.
Since it sounds like you control the Dockerfile, one workaround could be to change the base image to something lightweight but non-empty, like FROM busybox. That would give you a minimal set of tools that you could work with without blowing up the image size too much.
I am trying to do the same files check for my needs. I ended up with docker cp copy this file from container. In my case I am using nats container, but you can use any other container running scratch-based-image
sudo docker cp nats_nats_1:/nats-server.conf ./nats-server.conf
You can just grab the container identifier and throw it into a variable. For example, let's say the (truncated) output of docker ps -a is listed with your running container:
CONTAINER ID IMAGE
111111111111 neo4j-migrator
To further the example, you can docker exec -t using the variable you created. For example:
CONTAINER_ID=`docker ps -aqf "ancestor=neo4j-migrator"`
docker exec -it $CONAINER_ID \
sh -c "/usr/bin/neo4j-migrations \
--password $NEO4J_PASSWORD \
--username $NEO4J_USERNAME \
--address $NEO4J_URI \
migrate"

How to see docker image contents

I did a docker pull and can list the image that's downloaded. I want to see the contents of this image. Did a search on the net but no straight answer.
If the image contains a shell, you can run an interactive shell container using that image and explore whatever content that image has. If sh is not available, the busybox ash shell might be.
For instance:
docker run -it image_name sh
Or following for images with an entrypoint
docker run -it --entrypoint sh image_name
Or if you want to see how the image was built, meaning the steps in its Dockerfile, you can:
docker image history --no-trunc image_name > image_history
The steps will be logged into the image_history file.
You should not start a container just to see the image contents. For instance, you might want to look for malicious content, not run it. Use "create" instead of "run";
docker create --name="tmp_$$" image:tag
docker export tmp_$$ | tar t
docker rm tmp_$$
The accepted answer here is problematic, because there is no guarantee that an image will have any sort of interactive shell. For example, the drone/drone image contains on a single command /drone, and it has an ENTRYPOINT as well, so this will fail:
$ docker run -it drone/drone sh
FATA[0000] DRONE_HOST is not properly configured
And this will fail:
$ docker run --rm -it --entrypoint sh drone/drone
docker: Error response from daemon: oci runtime error: container_linux.go:247: starting container process caused "exec: \"sh\": executable file not found in $PATH".
This is not an uncommon configuration; many minimal images contain only the binaries necessary to support the target service. Fortunately, there are mechanisms for exploring an image filesystem that do not depend on the contents of the image. The easiest is probably the docker export command, which will export a container filesystem as a tar archive. So, start a container (it does not matter if it fails or not):
$ docker run -it drone/drone sh
FATA[0000] DRONE_HOST is not properly configured
Then use docker export to export the filesystem to tar:
$ docker export $(docker ps -lq) | tar tf -
The docker ps -lq there means "give me the id of the most recent docker container". You could replace that with an explicit container name or id.
docker save nginx > nginx.tar
tar -xvf nginx.tar
Following files are present:
manifest.json – Describes filesystem layers and name of json file that has the Container properties.
.json – Container properties
– Each “layerid” directory contains json file describing layer property and filesystem associated with that layer. Docker stores Container images as layers to optimize storage space by reusing layers across images.
https://sreeninet.wordpress.com/2016/06/11/looking-inside-container-images/
OR
you can use dive to view the image content interactively with TUI
https://github.com/wagoodman/dive
EXPLORING DOCKER IMAGE!
Figure out what kind of shell is in there bash or sh...
Inspect the image first: docker inspect name-of-container-or-image
Look for entrypoint or cmd in the JSON return.
Then do: docker run --rm -it --entrypoint=/bin/bash name-of-image
once inside do: ls -lsa or any other shell command like: cd ..
The -it stands for interactive... and TTY. The --rm stands for remove container after run.
If there are no common tools like ls or bash present and you have access to the Dockerfile simple add the common tool as a layer.
example (alpine Linux):
RUN apk add --no-cache bash
And when you don't have access to the Dockerfile then just copy/extract the files from a newly created container and look through them:
docker create <image> # returns container ID the container is never started.
docker cp <container ID>:<source_path> <destination_path>
docker rm <container ID>
cd <destination_path> && ls -lsah
To list the detailed content of an image you have to run docker run --rm image/name ls -alR where --rm means remove as soon as exits form a container.
If you want to list the files in an image without starting a container :
docker create --name listfiles <image name>
docker export listfiles | tar -t
docker rm listfiles
We can try a simpler one as follows:
docker image inspect image_id
This worked in Docker version:
DockerVersion": "18.05.0-ce"
if you want to check the image contents without running it you can do this:
$ sudo bash
...
$ cd /var/lib/docker # default path in most installations
$ find . -iname a_file_inside_the_image.ext
... (will find the base path here)
This works fine with the current default BTRFS storage driver.
Oneliner, no docker run (based on responses above)
IMAGE=your_image docker create --name filelist $IMAGE command && docker export filelist | tar tf - | tree --fromfile . && docker rm filelist
Same, but report tree structure to result.txt
IMAGE=your_image docker create --name filelist $IMAGE command && docker export filelist | tar tf - | tree --noreport --fromfile . | tee result.txt && docker rm filelist
I tried this tool - https://github.com/wagoodman/dive
I found it quite helpful to explore the content of the docker image.
Perhaps this is nota very straight forward approach but this one worked for me.
I had an ECR Repo (Amazon Container Service Repository) whose code i wanted to see.
First we need to save the repo you want to access as a tar file. In my case the command went like - docker save .dkr.ecr.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/<name_of_repo>:image-tag > saved-repo.tar
UNTAR the file using the command - tar -xvf saved-repo.tar. You could see many folders and files
Now try to find the file which contain the code you are looking for (if you know some part of the code)
Command for searching the file - grep -iRl "string you want to search" ./
This will make you reach the file. It can happen that even that file is tarred, so untar it using the command mentioned in step 2.
If you dont know the code you are searching for, you will need to go through all the files that you got after step 2 and this can be bit tiring.
All the Best !
There is a free open source tool called Anchore-CLI that you can use to scan container images. This command will allow you to list all files in a container image
anchore-cli image content myrepo/app:latest files
https://anchore.com/opensource/
EDIT: not available from anchore.com anymore, It's a python program you can install from https://github.com/anchore/anchore-cli
With Docker EE for Windows (17.06.2-ee-6 on Hyper-V Server 2016) all contents of Windows Containers can be examined at C:\ProgramData\docker\windowsfilter\ path of the host OS.
No special mounting needed.
Folder prefix can be found by container id from docker ps -a output.

Docker - how can I copy a file from an image to a host?

My question is related to this question on copying files from containers to hosts; I have a Dockerfile that fetches dependencies, compiles a build artifact from source, and runs an executable. I also want to copy the build artifact (in my case it's a .zip produced by sbt dist in '../target/`, but I think this question also applies to jars, binaries, etc.
docker cp works on containers, not images; do I need to start a container just to get a file out of it? In a script, I tried running /bin/bash in interactive mode in the background, copying the file out, and then killing the container, but this seems kludgey. Is there a better way?
On the other hand, I would like to avoid unpacking a .tar file after running docker save $IMAGENAME just to get one file out (but that seems like the simplest, if slowest, option right now).
I would use docker volumes, e.g.:
docker run -v hostdir:out $IMAGENAME /bin/cp/../blah.zip /out
but I'm running boot2docker in OSX and I don't know how to directly write to my mac host filesystem (read-write volumes are mounting inside my boot2docker VM, which means I can't easily share a script to extract blah.zip from an image with others. Thoughts?
To copy a file from an image, create a temporary container, copy the file from it and then delete it:
id=$(docker create image-name)
docker cp $id:path - > local-tar-file
docker rm -v $id
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to copy files directly from Docker images. You need to create a container first and then copy the file from the container.
However, if your image contains a cat command (and it will do in many cases), you can do it with a single command:
docker run --rm --entrypoint cat yourimage /path/to/file > path/to/destination
If your image doesn't contain cat, simply create a container and use the docker cp command as suggested in Igor's answer.
docker cp $(docker create --name tc registry.example.com/ansible-base:latest):/home/ansible/.ssh/id_rsa ./hacked_ssh_key && docker rm tc
wanted to supply a one line solution based on pure docker functionality (no bash needed)
edit: container does not even has to be run in this solution
edit2: thanks to #Jonathan Dumaine for --rm so the container will be removed after, i just never tried, because it sounded illogical to copy something from somewhere which has been already removed by the previous command, but i tried it and it works
edit3: due the comments we found out --rm is not working as expected, it does not remove the container because it never runs, so I added functionality to delete the created container afterwards(--name tc=temporary-container)
edit 4: this error appeared, seems like a bug in docker, because t is in a-z and this did not happen a few months before.
Error response from daemon: Invalid container name (t), only [a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9_.-] are allowed
A much faster option is to copy the file from running container to a mounted volume:
docker run -v $PWD:/opt/mount --rm --entrypoint cp image:version /data/libraries.tgz /opt/mount/libraries.tgz
real 0m0.446s
** VS **
docker run --rm --entrypoint cat image:version /data/libraries.tgz > libraries.tgz
real 0m9.014s
Parent comment already showed how to use cat. You could also use tar in a similar fashion:
docker run yourimage tar -c -C /my/directory subfolder | tar x
Another (short) answer to this problem:
docker run -v $PWD:/opt/mount --rm -ti image:version bash -c "cp /source/file /opt/mount/"
Update - as noted by #Elytscha Smith this only works if your image has bash built in
Not a direct answer to the question details, but in general, once you pulled an image, the image is stored on your system and so are all its files. Depending on the storage driver of the local Docker installation, these files can usually be found in /var/lib/docker/overlay2 (requires root access). overlay2 should be the most common storage driver nowadays, but the path may differ.
The layers associated with an image can be found using $ docker inspect image IMAGE_NAME:TAG, look for a GraphDriver attribute.
At least in my local environment, the following also works to quickly see all layers associated with an image:
docker inspect image IMAGE_NAME:TAG | jq ".[0].GraphDriver.Data"
In one of these diff directories, the wanted file can be found.
So in theory, there's no need to create a temporary container. Ofc this solution is pretty inconvenient.
First pull docker image using docker pull
docker pull <IMG>:<TAG>
Then, create a container using docker create command and store the container id is a variable
img_id=$(docker create <IMG>:<TAG>)
Now, run the docker cp command to copy folders and files from docker container to host
docker cp $img_id:/path/in/container /path/in/host
Once the files/folders are moved, delete the container using docker rm
docker rm -v $img_id
You essentially had the best solution already. Have the container copy out the files for you, and then remove itself when it's complete.
This will copy the files from /inside/container/ to your machine at /path/to/hostdir/.
docker run --rm -v /path/to/hostdir:/mnt/out "$IMAGENAME" /bin/cp -r /inside/container/ /mnt/out/
Update - here's a better version without the tar file:
$id = & docker create image-name
docker cp ${id}:path .
docker rm -v $id
Old answer
PowerShell variant of Igor Bukanov's answer:
$id = & docker create image-name
docker cp ${id}:path - > local-file.tar
docker rm -v $id
I am using boot2docker on MacOS. I can assure you that scripts based on "docker cp" are portable. Because any command is relayed inside boot2docker but then the binary stream is relayed back to the docker command line client running on your mac. So write operations from the docker client are executed inside the server and written back to the executing client instance!
I am sharing a backup script for docker volumes with any docker container I provide and my backup scripts are tested both on linux and MacOS with boot2docker. The backups can be easily exchanged between platforms. Basically I am executing the following command inside my script:
docker run --name=bckp_for_volume --rm --volumes-from jenkins_jenkins_1 -v /Users/github/jenkins/backups:/backup busybox tar cf /backup/JenkinsBackup-2015-07-09-14-26-15.tar /jenkins
Runs a new busybox container and mounts the volume of my jenkins container with the name jenkins_jenkins_1. The whole volume is written to the file backups/JenkinsBackup-2015-07-09-14-26-15.tar
I have already moved archives between the linux container and my mac container without any adjustments to the backup or restore script. If this is what you want you find the whole script an tutorial here: blacklabelops/jenkins
You could bind a local path on the host to a path on the container, and then cp the desired file(s) to that path at the end of your script.
$ docker run -d \
-it \
--name devtest \
--mount type=bind,source="$(pwd)"/target,target=/app \
nginx:latest
Then there is no need to copy afterwards.

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