docker-machine scp
Estimated reading time: 2 minutesCopy files from your local host to a machine, from machine to machine, or from a
machine to your local host using scp
.
The notation is machinename:/path/to/files
for the arguments; in the host
machine’s case, you don’t need to specify the name, just the path.
Example
Consider the following example:
$ cat foo.txt
cat: foo.txt: No such file or directory
$ docker-machine ssh dev pwd
/home/docker
$ docker-machine ssh dev 'echo A file created remotely! >foo.txt'
$ docker-machine scp dev:/home/docker/foo.txt .
foo.txt 100% 28 0.0KB/s 00:00
$ cat foo.txt
A file created remotely!
Just like how scp
has a -r
flag for copying files recursively,
docker-machine
has a -r
flag for this feature.
In the case of transferring files from machine to machine,
they go through the local host’s filesystem first (using scp
’s -3
flag).
When transferring large files or updating directories with lots of files,
you can use the -d
flag, which uses rsync
to transfer deltas instead of
transferring all of the files.
When transferring directories and not just files, avoid rsync surprises by using trailing slashes on both the source and destination. For example:
$ mkdir -p bar
$ touch bar/baz
$ docker-machine scp -r -d bar/ dev:/home/docker/bar/
$ docker-machine ssh dev ls bar
baz
Specifying file paths for remote deployments
When you copy files to a remote server with docker-machine scp
for app
deployment, make sure docker-compose
and the Docker daemon know how to find
them. Avoid using relative paths, but specify absolute paths in
Compose files. It’s best to specify absolute
paths both for the location on the Docker daemon and within the container.
For example, imagine you want to transfer your local directory
/Users/<username>/webapp
to a remote machine and bind mount it into a
container on the remote host. If the remote user is ubuntu
, use a command like
this:
$ docker-machine scp -r /Users/<username>/webapp MACHINE-NAME:/home/ubuntu/webapp
Then write a docker-compose file that bind mounts it in:
version: "3.1"
services:
webapp:
image: alpine
command: cat /app/root.php
volumes:
- "/home/ubuntu/webapp:/app"
And we can try it out like so:
$ eval $(docker-machine env MACHINE-NAME)
$ docker-compose run webapp