Gotcha: dockerignore

Today I was caught off-guard by a docker “bug” - or so I thought at first. I tried to boot up a project with docker-compose up like I do since switching to a Mac. Unusual was that docker-compose stopped at the build step and would not finish the boot. After some confusion and after checking the projects docker-compose.yml configuration file I went to GitHub to see the newest docker for mac issues because I was using the beta release and thought a recent update might broke a thing or two. Looking at the issues I found a similar issue in docker/for-mac and commented with my setup and output of docker-compose --verbose up only to realize a good 30 minutes later my setup was the problem all along.

While the configuration files were all correct, I made a mistake and did not provide a .dockerignore file. Without the .dockerignore two 6GB SQL dumps in the same directory which were mounted into the docker container which made the docker daemon crash / hang up. The simple solution was to create the following .dockerignore file.

# database directory on the host
.db
# all sql and gz files
*.sql
*.gz

Afterwards the docker-compose started without any issues because it now had a build context of around 400MB instead of 13GB.

Lesson learned: Always make sure your .dockerignore is setup right and ignores all big files! The full file looks as follows:

node_modules
.sass-cache
.db
*.sql
*.gz
.git