ADD does not support FTP URLs

[dtenenba]

Hi,

I would like to use the ADD command in a Dockerfile with an FTP url, but it doesn't appear to work.

My Dockerfile has this line in it:

ADD ftp://ftp.stat.math.ethz.ch/Software/R/R-devel.tar.gz /tmp/R-source/

And when I attempt to build it, I get:

Step 5 : ADD ftp://ftp.stat.math.ethz.ch/Software/R/R-devel.tar.gz /tmp/R-source/

2014/11/24 10:49:46 ftp://ftp.stat.math.ethz.ch/Software/R/R-devel.tar.gz: no such file or directory

Unfortunately, the tarball I am trying to download is not available at an HTTP url. Can ADD be modified to support FTP URLs?

I am aware that I could use RUN curl... to download from this URL, but I want the behavior of ADD which checks to see if the URL contents have changed and invalidates the cache if they have.

[dtenenba]

I've worked around this for now by adding a cron job to download from the FTP url and upload to an S3 bucket. Would still be interested in a fix but it's not a high priority. Close if you have better things to do. ;)

[endersonmaia]

I'm in need of the same thing here, I need to access an ftp server, that requires me to inform anonymous as user.

So ADD should support ftp://user@host too.

[thaJeztah]

I think the core team is planning to deprecate / phase out ADD in the future, because there's too much "magic" in this instruction (it downloads, extracts all automatically). So, I doubt this will be implemented.

Perhaps, as an alternative, use curl to download the file? Something like;

RUN curl -u user:password 'ftp://host/file' -o myfile

[dtenenba]

I would prefer not to use curl for the reasons I mentioned above. I want to invalidate the cache if the file contents change. For that reason I really like the ADD directive and would not want to see it go away. It does exactly what I want it to do (except handle ftp URLs). I can work around the ftp issue using the method mentioned above but without ADD there will be no way to break the cache without changing the Dockerfile, so I would implore you to keep some way of doing that. Thanks.

On November 27, 2014 12:53:25 PM PST, Sebastiaan van Stijn [email protected] wrote:

I think the core team is planning to deprecate / phase out ADD in the
future, because there's too much "magic" in this instruction (it
downloads, extracts all automatically). So, I doubt this will be
implemented.

Perhaps, as an alternative, use curl to download the file? Something
like;

RUN curl -u user:password 'ftp://host/file' -o myfile

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#9314 (comment)

[thaJeztah]

@dtenenba ah, sorry I missed that part that you mentioned it, I was trying to offer @Enderson an alternative for his case.

so I would implore you to keep some way of doing that

Well, I'm not a maintainer so I have no say in this 😄

[GordonTheTurtle]

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The people listed below have upvoted this issue by leaving a +1 comment:

@bw2

[thaJeztah]

We haven't seen more requests for this, so I'm closing this as it's not a priority

[hznut]

+1 Need support for FTP and sambashare

[nick4fake]

+1

[GeekLogan]

+1

[ahwagner]

Hey @thaJeztah, are we supposed to make additional requests to re-open this issue by adding comments? Or is subscribing to this page as @GordonTheTurtle suggests enough?

Either way, +1.

[thaJeztah]

@ahwagner it would help if you could describe your use case; t.b.h., we're in doubt if we want to add more complexity to ADD, there's already a lot of things it does. Adding support for ftp would probably require implementing a whole ftp client (what about sftp, etc etc)

[justincormack]

Also most providers are in the process of phasing out anonymous FTP support. On 27 Feb 2017 13:30, "Sebastiaan van Stijn" <[email protected]> wrote: @ahwagner <https://github.com/ahwagner> it would help if you could describe your use case; t.b.h., we're in doubt if we want to add more complexity to ADD, there's already a lot of things it does. Adding support for ftp would probably require implementing a whole ftp client (what about sftp, etc etc) — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#9314 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAdcPCRvj36GPaTaPEQr2PO2K7VH5JPhks5rg0BdgaJpZM4DAAl7> .

[GeekLogan]

@thaJeztah while I can not speak for others, but my primary desire for this feature is rooted in the ability to pull public scientific data into Docker containers at deploy-time. Much of it is stored in public FTP servers which have not/will not be updated to another storage scheme in the foreseeable future.

Example:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK158899/

[thaJeztah]

If it's at deploy time, adding support for ftp to ADD won't be of much help, as that's only during build

[pgcalixto]

I was trying to download a file with FTP using ADD, during build time, and I couldn't.

Also, some images, like Ubuntu:16.04 (the one I'm using), do not have cURL installed. So, instead of just adding one file to Docker's ADD command:

ADD http-file-01 \
    http-file-02 \
    ...
    ftp-file \
    ...
    <path>

I'd have to add one more Docker command, adding one more layer to the image, and increasing the size of the image for installing cURL:

RUN apt-get update \
 && apt-get install curl \
 && curl -u user:password 'ftp://host/file' -o myfile

+1 for FTP support.