I recently stumbled over this odd error message in one of our gitlab runners: ERROR: for nginx_proxy Cannot start service load_balancer: OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:348: starting container process caused “process_linux.go:402: container init caused "rootfs_linux.go:58: mounting \"/builds/group/project/nginx/nginx.conf\" to rootfs \"/data/docker/overlay2/88fb8a0ee201dd14cfc9aa9befe4d7a5eb28e5ec816a2d76726040316853ed11/merged\" at \"/data/docker/overlay2/88fb8a0ee201dd14cfc9aa9befe4d7a5eb28e5ec816a2d76726040316853ed11/merged/etc/nginx/nginx.conf\" caused \"not a directory\""”: unknown: Are you trying to mount a directory onto a file (or vice-versa)? Check if the specified host path exists and is the expected type

It is the result of using the docker-compose up myservice command which is defined to use just an image and mounts files like so: - ./nginx/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf

I’ve spent a bit of time figuring out what the underlying problem is. In hindsight, the error message already gives it away, but I was unable to reproduce the issue on my host machine. That is because the problem is actually more related to docker than your host.

When I found out, that the runner in gitlab is actually a docker container, it dawned upon me, that the operation we do here is a container-in-a-container operation.  The container typically shares the same docker instance with the host system. The bind mount actually happens on the host machine. It tries to mount the path from a directory/file which doesn’t exist on the host machine.

To verify if we can reproduce the same error on the host, I tried to bind mount a volume with a path which doesn’t exist and voila: $ sudo docker run –rm -it –volume /build/nginx/nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/nginx.conf nginx –help docker: Error response from daemon: OCI runtime create failed: container_linux.go:348: starting container process caused “process_linux.go:402: container init caused "rootfs_linux.go:58: mounting \"/build/nginx/nginx.conf\" to rootfs \"/var/lib/docker/devicemapper/mnt/2fab14f3dc592d19b1408618a5ba26e88e334d88fe6b7524dc6c30bb0d26bbfc/rootfs\" at \"/var/lib/docker/devicemapper/mnt/2fab14f3dc592d19b1408618a5ba26e88e334d88fe6b7524dc6c30bb0d26bbfc/rootfs/etc/nginx/nginx.conf\" caused \"not a directory\""”: unknown: Are you trying to mount a directory onto a file (or vice-versa)? Check if the specified host path exists and is the expected type.

Be weary of running docker in docker when you need to bind mount volumes. Prefer a bare metal or VM as a runner.