Having docker related files in a sub directory

[Pascal Müller (pascal-mueller)]

Hello,

Assume / is my project root. Assume I put all my Dockerfiles and docker-compose files in /deployment. So if I wanted to build an image, I'd do:

cd /
docker build . -f deployment/SomeDockerfile -t my_app:latest

or something similar. Please note the . which tells Docker the context. Now I'd like to just rightclick the Dockerfile and/or use ctrl+shit+p to build the image.

Similar issue with docker compose. E.g. you also want to provide a .env file.

I was wondering, how you all solved this because I can't be the only one who does this, no?

[Brandon Waterloo [MSFT] (bwateratmsft)]

Take a look at the docker-build task, I think it can do what you need. It allows you to separately specify the Dockerfile and context, along with many other arguments. There is a similar docker-compose task as well.

For example, do do the above docker build command, this task in .vscode/tasks.json should work (paths may need a little adjusting):

		{
			"type": "docker-build",
			"label": "docker-build",
			"dockerBuild": {
				"tag": "my_app:latest",
				"dockerfile": "${workspaceFolder}/deployment/SomeDockerfile",
				"context": "${workspaceFolder}"
			}
		},

When you right-click > Build that Dockerfile, we look into .vscode/tasks.json to see if there is a build task that references it, and if so we execute the task instead of the default docker build terminal command.

[Pascal Müller (pascal-mueller)]

Thanks, I'll give that a go :)