Change file permissions in mounted folder inside docker container on Windows Host

I had the same problem of not being able to change ownership even after using chown. And as I researched, it was because of NTFS volumes being mounted inside ext filesystem. So I used another approach.

The volumes internal to docker are free from these problems. So you can mount your file on internal docker volume and then create a hard symlink to that file inside your local folder wherever you want:

sudo ln $(docker volume inspect --format '{{ .Mountpoint }}' <project_name>_<volume_name>) <absolute_path_of_destination>

This way you can have your files in desired place, inside docker and without any permission issues, and you will be able to modify the contents of file as in the normal volume mount due to hard symlink.

Here is a working implementation of this process which mounts and links a directory. In case you wanna know about the details, see possible fix section in issue.

EDIT

Steps to implement this approach:

1. Mount the concerned file in internal docker-volume(also known as named volumes).

2. Before making hardlink, make sure volumes and concerned file are present there. To ensure this, you should have run your container at least once before or if you want to automate this file creation, you can include a docker run which creates the required files and exits.

   docker run --rm -itd \ -v "<Project_name>_<volume_name>:/absolute/path" \ <image> bash -c "touch /absolute/path/<my_file>"

This docker run will create volumes and required files. Here, container is my project name, by default, it is the name of the folder in which project is present and <volume_name> is the same as one which we want to use in our original container. <image> can be the same one which is already being used in your original containers.

3. Create a hardlink in your OS to the actual file location on your system. You can find the file location using docker volume inspect --format '{{ .Mountpoint }}' <project_name>_<volume_name>/<my_file>. Linux users can use ln in terminal and windows users can use mklink in command prompt.

In step 3 we have not used /absolute/path since the <volume_name> refers to that location already, and we just need to refer to the file.

Try one of the following:

1. If you can rebuild the image image: image: (secrect company registry)/docker-stretchimal-apache2-php7-pma then inside the docker file, add the following

   USER root RUN chmod 655 config.inc.php

Then you can rebuild the image and push it to the registry, and what you were doing should work. This should be your preferred solution, as you don't want to be manually changing the permissions everytime you start a new container

2. Try to exec using the user root explicitly

   docker exec -it -u root [container] bash