docker: "build" requires 1 argument. See 'docker build --help'

Did you copy the build command from somewhere else (webpage or some other file)? Try typing it in from scratch.

I copied a build command from an AWS tutorial and pasted it into my terminal and was getting this error. It was driving me crazy. After typing it in by hand, it worked! Looking closer and my previous failed commands, I noticed the "dash" character was different, it was a thinner, longer dash character than I got if I typed it myself using the "minus/dash" key.

Bad:

sudo docker build –t foo .

Good:

sudo docker build -t foo .

Can you see the difference?.. Cut and paste is hard.

In case anyone is running into this problem when trying to tag -t the image and also build it from a file that is NOT named Dockerfile (i.e. not using simply the . path), you can do it like this:

docker build -t my_image -f my_dockerfile .

Notice that docker expects a directory as the parameter and the filename as an option.

In my case this error was happening in a Gitlab CI pipeline when I was passing multiple Gitlab env variables to docker build with --build-arg flags.

Turns out that one of the variables had a space in it which was causing the error. It was difficult to find since the pipeline logs just showed the $VARIABLE_NAME.

Make sure to quote the environment variables so that spaces get handled correctly.

Change from:

--build-arg VARIABLE_NAME=$VARIABLE_NAME

to:

--build-arg VARIABLE_NAME="$VARIABLE_NAME"

You need to add a dot, which means to use the Dockerfile in the local directory.

For example:

docker build -t mytag .

It means you use the Dockerfile in the local directory, and if you use docker 1.5 you can specify a Dockerfile elsewhere. Extract from the help output from docker build:

-f, --file="" Name of the Dockerfile(Default is 'Dockerfile' at context root)