Working directory when running a Docker container with a Docker-Compose file

Question

I'm trying to set up a CI pipeline which uses a Docker container to run tests. The pipeline is supposed to create a container based on an image I already have and remove that container when it's finished.

For my tests I need to mount a few volumes and bind a few ports from my runner to my container, so to simplify things I want to use a docker-compose file that's constantly stored in /home/runner/docker/docker-compose.yml on my runner.

The problem is as follows: in my docker-compose.yml I have the following lines, binding the current working directory to the HTML folder in my container :

volumes:
  - .:var/www/html

When I use the command docker-compose -f "/home/runner/docker/docker-compose.yml" -d, . should be whichever folder GitLab CI cloned my project to, not /home/runner/dockeras is currently the case.

Is there a way to make it so that . is my cloned project folder (without hardcoding the name), or am I better off just executing a docker run in my GitLab CI script?

Answer 1

One option could be to use an environment variable to define the path to the repo, so that instead of

volumes:
  - .:var/www/html

you have

volumes:
  - ${YOUR_REPO}:var/www/html

This way you only need to set YOUR_REPO before running docker-compose and that's it.