Once created, run the container and inspect the contents of the /build-context directory which includes everything not excluded by the .dockerignore file:
# run the default find command
docker container run --rm build-context
# or inspect it from a shell using
docker container run --rm -it build-context /bin/sh
To expand on BMitch's answer (which implements VonC's answer), you can do it with one simple command:
# no cache to ensure output
# progress plain in case you are using buildkit
docker build --no-cache --progress plain --file - . <<EOF
FROM busybox
COPY . /build-context
WORKDIR /build-context
RUN find .
EOF
Switching from CMD to RUN means you don't have to ever run the container as the build will output the result of the find ..
To expand on Lucas' answer which expands on BMitch's answer (which implements VonC's answer), if you are using buildx you will also need to set the type of progress output by adding --progress plain and of course to not forget the --no-cache:
docker build --no-cache --progress plain -f - . <<EOF
FROM busybox
COPY . /build_context
WORKDIR /build_context
RUN find .
EOF
One thing that the other answers do not consider, is that this will potentially copy many gigabytes of data and be very slow, when all you want to do is find out which file(s) you need to exclude to reduce the image size.
So here is how you test your .dockerignore without actually copying data:
What this will do, is try to sync your current directory with the empty in-memory folder /dev/shm verbosely and dry-run (don't actually copy anything) the --exclude-from option reads glob patterns in the same format as .gitignore and .dockerignore
You will end up with a list of files copied and a summary with the total size at the end:
file.bogus
tests/
tests/conftest.py
tests/test_model.py
sent 1,954 bytes received 207 bytes 4,322.00 bytes/sec
total size is 209,916,337 speedup is 97,138.52 (DRY RUN)
Add it to .dockerignore:
*.bogus
and test again:
tests/
tests/conftest.py
tests/test_model.py
sent 1,925 bytes received 204 bytes 4,258.00 bytes/sec
total size is 201,145 speedup is 94.48 (DRY RUN)
This is extremely fast and doesn't fill your disk.
Edit: There is one difference that I have found. For rsync the pattern *.bogus matches all files with that name regardless of the directory. .dockerignore however only matches *.bogus in the current directory. To get the same behavior you need to prefix the pattern with the path glob characters **/*.bogus This will still work with rsync.
As he mentioned the rsync matches all files regardless of directory position on the *.bogus which means if you want to negate the .dockerignore file and ignore everything except for what you want to allow, which results in putting * at the top of the .dockerignore file, then the rsync method won't transfer any files at all,, even if you have a negated statement for a file just right below it, but a tool to check this would be amazing.
Even having a vscode extension for seeing the files that are ignored and allowed in the file browser would be amazing, just like the git and gitignore thing in vscode file explorer.