Pip install -e packages don't appear in Docker

Question

I have a requirements.txt file containing, amongst others:

Flask-RQ==0.2 -e git+https://token:[email protected]/user/repo.git#egg=repo 

When I try to build a Docker container using Docker Compose, it downloads both packages, and install them both, but when I do a pip freeze there is no sign of the -e package. When I try to run the app, it looks as if this package hasn't been installed. Here's the relevant output from the build:

Collecting Flask-RQ==0.2 (from -r requirements.txt (line 3))   Downloading Flask-RQ-0.2.tar.gz Obtaining repo from git+https://token:[email protected]/user/repo.git#egg=repo (from -r requirements.txt (line 4))   Cloning https://token:[email protected]/user/repo.git to ./src/repo 

And here's my Dockerfile:

FROM python:2.7  RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app WORKDIR /usr/src/app  COPY requirements.txt /usr/src/app/ RUN pip install -r requirements.txt  COPY . /usr/src/app 

I find this situation very strange and would appreciate any help.

Answer 1

I ran into a similar issue, and one possible way that the problem can appear is from:

WORKDIR /usr/src/app 

being set before pip install. pip will create the src/ directory (where the package is installed) inside of the WORKDIR. Now all of this shouldn't be an issue since your app files, when copied over, should not overwrite the src/ directory.

However, you might be mounting a volume to /usr/src/app. When you do that, you'll overwrite the /usr/src/app/src directory and then your package will not be found.

So one fix is to move WORKDIR after the pip install. So your Dockerfile will look like:

FROM python:2.7  RUN mkdir -p /usr/src/app  COPY requirements.txt /usr/src/app/ RUN pip install -r /usr/src/app/requirements.txt  COPY . /usr/src/app WORKDIR /usr/src/app 

This fixed it for me. Hopefully it'll work for you.