Mount host directory with a symbolic link inside in docker container

Question

Symlinks are a big challenge inside docker. In your case you can mount both directories:

-v /home/test/:/home/test -v /mnt/mountedfile:/mnt/mountedfile

For symbolic links to work both inside and outside the container, they have to be absolute paths and use exactly the same names.

In general, symlinks do not work inside docker. I found this the hard way.

One solution is to make Docker mount the original file, but use readlink -f which prints the file's actual location. This way, you can still reference the symlink location in your command, e.g.

docker run -it -v $(readlink -f /home/test/):/home/test/ ...