Container starts and immediately stops when mounted to a volume

Question

I have the most basic console application which logs messages to a location in container. I just want that messages to be written to a persistance volume located in my docker host.

Container - windows container

OS - Windows 10

Code:

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        Console.WriteLine("starting");
       string path = @"c:\exe\MyTest.txt";
        int i = 0;
        while (true)
        {
            string createText = $" {i} + Hello and Welcome"+ Environment.NewLine;
            File.AppendAllText(path, createText);
            i++;
        }      
    }
}

Dockerfile:

# getting base image
FROM microsoft/windowsservercore:latest

ADD ./bin/debug /exe/

VOLUME c:/data   # this line creates issue

ENTRYPOINT ["/exe/BackendService.bat"]

BackendService.bat

start c:\exe\ConsoleApp16.exe 

Command Run:

docker build -t fridayimg1:1.0 .   

docker run {ImageID}

Everything works fine if I do not give Volume info in the DockerFile.

PS: So, the problem is as soon as I start mentioning Volume the container starts and then exits. When I do docker {containerID} inspect , I can see that the container c:/data has been mounted to a physical location in my Volumes folder.

Question: Why my container starts and then exits immediately. But as soon as I remove the volume tag, it continues to work fine and loop and writes messages to MyTest.txt file inside the container.

Answer 1

You need to map the volume when you run the container, not when you build it (in Dockerfile).

docker run -v ./data:/data <your image>

This will map a folder "data" in your current folder to the path "/data" in your container.