Question about behavior of COPY in Dockerfile. An AI is gaslighting me, unsure which
In a Dockerfile
does
A:
produces the same behavior as this
B:
???
Both Gpt4-o and Gemini insist they are equivalent, Claude 3.7 disagrees
From the docs https://docs.docker.com/reference/dockerfile/#destination-1
Trailing slashes are significant. For example, COPY test.txt /abs creates a file at /abs, whereas COPY test.txt /abs/ creates /abs/test.txt.I believe A and B are equivalent, but just wanted to fact check. I'm confused now.
Docker Documentation
Dockerfile reference
Find all the available commands you can use in a Dockerfile and learn how to use them, including COPY, ARG, ENTRYPOINT, and more.
1 Reply
So, there is a difference; what is happening you are choosing an item in your case the
ws directory to copy INTO the node_modules directory, but not the folder itself. So you want to use command A in this situation, otherwise the your node_modules folder will have the contents of the folder ws instead of having the content of ws inside a module folder named ws which is a child of node_modules. Hope this make sense 😅