Mount Windows folder to Boot2Docker VM

Thomas Uhrig · June 24, 2015

I just stumbled over a post on Stackoverflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30864466/whats-the-best-way-to-share-files-from-windows-to-boot2docker-vm) with the question how to mount a Windows folder to a Boot2Docker VM. Although the steps are a little bit confusing, in the end it is not difficult to do.

Boot2Docker

Boot2Docker is a simple VM to run Docker. The VM will run on VirtualBox and Boot2Docker is just a tool to provision this VM (very similar to Vagrant, but smaller and customized for using Docker). You simply download and install Boot2Docker and run boot2docker up to start the VM. After the VM is up, you can run boot2docker ssh to login. Now, we can start to get our Windows folder.

Mounting the folder

To use one of your Windows folders in your Boot2Docker VM, you need to mount it. To do so, you mount your Windows folder to the VM:

C:/Program Files/Oracle/VirtualBox/VBoxManage sharedfolder add boot2docker-vm -name /opt/my/folder/with/code -hostpath c:/my/folder/with/code

Now you login to your VM via SSH (with boot2docker ssh) and do the following:

Make a folder inside your VM:

sudo mkdir /my_windows_folder

Mount your stuff from Windows:

sudo mount -t vboxsf /opt/my/folder/with/code /my_windows_folder

After that, you can access c:/my/folder/with/code inside your Boot2Docker VM:

cd /my_windows_folder

Now, that your code is present inside your VM, you can use it with Docker. Either by mounting it as a volume to the container:

docker run -v /my_windows_folder:/folder/in/container some/image

Or by using it while building your Docker image:

… ADD /my_windows_folder /folder …

Best regards, Thomas