Running docker on Ubuntu: mounted host volume is not writable from container

Docker works great on a Mac for me, but I have to run docker host inside of a VirtualBox (or Parallels, or VMWare Fusion), since Mac's kernel doesn't support docker.

So I tried to setup my application and a docker-compose on an Ubuntu Desktop - natively, where both docker client and docker host run physically on the same system. This worked, but my running docker containers can't write into a mounted host volume.

I use docker-compose with the following settings:

volumes:
   - ./api:/usr/src/app

So I'm mounting the "api" directory of the host Ubuntu OS into docker container under /usr/src/app.

docker inspect <container ID> shows that the volume is writable

"Destination": "/usr/src/app",
"Mode": "rw",
"RW": true

However it is not: I get permission denied when I try to create a directory or edit a file from within the docker container.

I googled for this issue, of course, and I came across a few SELinux issues of CentOS/RHEL, but I'm running Ubuntu 15.10, 64 bit edition, not CentOS.

Solution

If your uid on the host (id -u) isn't the same as the uid of the user in the docker container (often "docker") then you can have this problem. You can try:

Making the UIDs the same between your user and the user in the docker container.
Setting the group permissions on the directory to be writable for a group that both you and docker belong to.
You could also use the nuclear option:

chmod a+rwx -R project-dir/

The nuclear option will make your git workspace filthy, which will annoy you greatly, so isn't the best long-term solution. It stops the bleeding tho.

For further understanding the problem, you might find these useful: