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Documentation/bugfix request: mapping paths in Docker

Open michael1006 opened this issue 5 months ago • 0 comments

I installed overleaf-toolkit on a brand-new Mac, everything up to date, after installing Docker Desktop, into /opt/bin/overleaf-toolkit. Then when running bin/up I'd get error messages like:

The path /opt/overleaf-toolkit/data/mongo is not shared from the host and is not known to Docker.
You can configure shared paths from Docker -> Preferences... -> Resources -> File Sharing.
See https://docs.docker.com/go/mac-file-sharing/ for more info.

So I did what the messages seemed to be suggesting, and added the following as shared directories in Docker Desktop:

/opt/overleaf-toolkit/data/mongo
/opt/overleaf-toolkit/data/overleaf
/opt/overleaf-toolkit/data/redis

No more error messages, it starts, and I can use Overleaf. The problem is that after ending it with bin/stop and restarting with bin/up all the data is gone! It's a fresh installation asking me to create an admin account.

After much trial and error, I finally figured out that it only works correctly if I add a single shared directory instead:

/opt/overleaf-toolkit

With that, all the data actually persists across restarts. So this is obviously a required configuration, yet:

So it seems like some combination of the following would be helpful?

  • Updating the documentation for installation
  • Clarifying the error message about the correct path that needs to be shared
  • Producing an error if the correct path has not been shared

Hopefully this issue can help other people running into the same problem, with how to solve it.

michael1006 avatar Jul 19 '25 15:07 michael1006