Cannot mount local directory into container from docker-compose file

Question

I want to mount the local directory of a project to docker container before I used COPY command but when I make changes I have to rebuild those parts which involve some installation from bash scripts.

This is my docker-compose file

version "3.7"
services
 tesseract:
    container_name: tesseract
    build:
      context: ./app/services/tesseract/
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    volumes:
      - ./app/services/tesseract:/tesseract/

I don't have any errors when building and my WORKDIR tesseract is empty when i run container

This is my Dockerfile

FROM ubuntu:19.10

ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
ENV TESSERACT=/usr/share/tesseract

WORKDIR /tesseract

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    build-essential \
    software-properties-common \
    python3.7 \
    python3-pip \
    cmake \
    autoconf \
    automake \
    libtool \
    pkg-config \
    libpng-dev \
    tesseract-ocr \
    libtesseract-dev \
    libpango1.0-dev \
    libicu-dev \
    libcairo2-dev \
    libjpeg8-dev \
    zlib1g-dev \
    libtiff5-dev \
    wget \
    git \
    g++ \
    vim

RUN git clone https://github.com/tesseract-ocr/tesseract $TESSERACT

COPY . /tesseract/
RUN chmod +x scripts/*
RUN scripts/compile_tesseract.sh
RUN scripts/langdata_lstm.sh scripts/start.sh
RUN pip3 install -r requirements.txt

ENV TESSDATA_PREFIX=/usr/share/tesseract/tessdata

Answer 1

Main objective of docker volume is

Volumes are the preferred mechanism for persisting data generated by and used by Docker containers.

which means volumes are used to persist the data outside the lifecycle of a container. If you want to COPY a file or a directory into a container, please use COPY instruction.

If you're copying in local files to your Docker image, always use COPY because it's more explicit.

With Docker-compose, you can use a bind mount volume

https://docs.docker.com/compose/gettingstarted/#step-5-edit-the-compose-file-to-add-a-bind-mount#step-5-edit-the-compose-file-to-add-a-bind-mount