named docker volume not updating using docker-compose

Question

I'm trying to have one service to build my client side and then share it to the server using a named volume. Every time I do a docker-compose up --build I want the client side to build and update the named volume clientapp:. How do I do that?

docker-compose.yml

version: '2' 

volumes:
  clientapp:

services:
  database:
    image: mongo:3.4
    volumes:
      - /data/db
      - /var/lib/mongodb
      - /var/log/mongodb

  client:
    build: ./client
    volumes:
      - clientapp:/usr/src/app/client

  server:
    build: ./server
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    environment:
      - DB_1_PORT_27017_TCP_ADDR=database
    volumes:
      - clientapp:/usr/src/app/client
    depends_on:
      - client
      - database

client Dockerfile

FROM node:6

ENV NPM_CONFIG_LOGLEVEL warn

RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app

WORKDIR /usr/src/app

COPY package.json /usr/src/app

RUN npm install

COPY . /usr/src/app

# builds my application into /client
CMD ["npm", "build"]

Answer 1

By definition, a volume is the persistent directories that docker won't touch other than to perform an initial creation when they are empty. If this is your code, it probably shouldn't be a volume.

With that said, you can:

1. Delete the volume between runs with docker-compose down -v and it will be recreated and initialized on the next docker-compose up -d.

2. Change your container startup scripts to copy the files from some other directory in the image to the volume location on startup.

3. Get rid of the volume and include the code directly in the image.

I'd recommend the latter.

Answer 2

Imagine you shared your src folder like this :

...
volumes:
      - ./my_src:/path/to/docker/src
...

What worked for me is to chown the my_src folder :

chown $USER:$USER -R my_src

It turned out some files were created by root and couldn't be modified by docker.

Hope it helps !