I'm following this tutorial that uses Docker. When I tried to run Docker (inside the run.sh script):
docker run \
-p 8888:8888
-v `pwd`/../src:/src \
-v `pwd`/../data:/data -w /src supervisely_anpr \
--rm \
-it \
bash
I got the error:
docker: invalid reference format.
I spent 2 hours and I can't really understand what's wrong. Any idea really appreciated.
In powershell you should use ${pwd} instead of $(pwd)
The first argument after the "run" that is not a flag or parameter to a flag is parsed as an image name. When that parsing fails, it tells you the reference format, aka image name (but could be an image id, pinned image, or other syntax) is invalid. In your command:
docker run -p 8888:8888 -v `pwd`/../src:/src -v `pwd`/../data:/data -w /src supervisely_anpr --rm -it bash
The image name "supervisely_anpr" is valid, so you need to look earlier in the command. In this case, the error is most likely from pwd outputting a path with a space in it. Everything after the space is no longer a parameter to -v and docker tries to parse it as the image name. The fix is to quote the volume parameters when you cannot guarantee it is free of spaces or other special characters.
When you do that, you'll encounter the next error, "executable not found". Everything after the image name is parsed as the command to run inside the container. In your case, it will try to run the command --rm -it bash which will almost certainly fail since --rm will no exist as a binary inside your image. You need to reorder the parameters to resolve that:
docker run --rm -it -p 8888:8888 -v "`pwd`/../src:/src" -v "`pwd`/../data:/data" -w /src supervisely_anpr bash
I've got some more details on these two errors and causes in my slides here: https://sudo-bmitch.github.io/presentations/dc2018/faq-stackoverflow-lightning.html#29
I had the same issue when I copy-pasted the command. Instead, when I typed-in the entire command, it worked!
Good Luck...
I ran into this issue when I didn't have an environment variable set.
docker push ${repo}${image_name}:${tag}
repo and image_name were defined but tag wasn't.
This resulted in docker push repo/image_name:.
Which threw the docker: invalid reference format.
I had a similar problem.
Issue I was having was $(pwd) has a space in there which was throwing docker run off.
Change the directory name to not have spaces in there, and it should work if this is the problem
I was having the same problem on Linux. That was because of directory names contained spaces. I fixed it by using "$(pwd)/path/to/go" instead of $(pwd)/path/to/go
For others come here:
If you happen to put your docker command in a file, say run.sh, check your line separator. In Linux, it should be LR, otherwise you would get the same error.
I was executing the whole command in one line, as it was mentioned as such
$ docker run --name testproject-agent \
-e TP_API_KEY="REPLACE_WITH_YOUR_KEY" \
-e TP_AGENT_ALIAS="My First Agent" \
testproject/agent:latest
But its supposed to be a multiline command, and I copied the command line by line and pressed enter after every line and bam! it worked.
Sometimes when you copy off of the web, the new-line character gets omitted, hence my suggestion to try manually introducing the new line.
In my case, the command was like this
docker run -d --name kong-database \
--network=kong-net \
-p 5432:5432 \
-e "POSTGRES_USER=kong" \
-e "POSTGRES_DB=kong" \
-e "POSTGRES_PASSWORD=kongpass" \
postgres:9.6
I was trying to copy everything in a single line including slash (\) and was getting the following error
docker: invalid reference format.
The slash (\) in the command indicates the next line, so if you are trying to run the complete command in a single line just remove the slash (\), it worked for me
Thanks :)
I was using a very generic command
docker build .
It turned out that I needed to just specify the tag name otherwise there was no name to use
docker build . -t image_name
And then it worked.
This also happens when you use development docker compose like the below, in production. You don't want to be building images in production as that breaks the ideology of containers. We should be deploying images:
web:
build: .
command: python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
volumes:
- .:/code
ports:
- "8000:8000"
Change that to use the built image:
web:
command: /bin/bash run.sh
image: registry.example.com:9000/dyndns_api_web:0.1
ports:
- "8000:8000"
Found that using docker-compose config reported what the problem was.
In my case, an override compose file with an entry that was overriding nothing.
I removed () and worked for me like this
docker run -d -v $pwd/envoy.yaml:/etc/envoy/envoy.yaml:ro -p 8080:8080 -p 9901:9901
I am using windows 10
Sometimes the problem is an additional whitespace at the end of line.
Bad:
-v "$(pwd)/../src:/src" \
Spaces at the end!
Good:
-v "$(pwd)/../src:/src" \
Only newline after the slash!
Bonus hint: Some editors (like VSCode) give a different color to a slash followed with a whitespace.
I was getting the same issue while using $(pwd) through powershell, I replaced it with ${pwd} and it worked for me.
Following are the details for the same:
PS C:\Users\Systems\git\mastery\dockerfile> docker container run -d --name nginx -p 8080:80 -v $(pwd):/usr/share/nginx/html nginx
docker: invalid reference format.
See 'docker run --help'.
PS C:\Users\Systems\git\mastery\dockerfile> docker container run -d --name nginx -p 8080:80 -v ${pwd}:/usr/share/nginx/html nginx
Unable to find image 'nginx:latest' locally
latest: Pulling from library/nginx
Digest: sha256:25975292693bcc062becc20a1608936927f9950a42fb4474088f6292dacd4ec9
Status: Downloaded newer image for nginx:latest
f6ff08ed3b73095e85474bd2f248a7cae6b5bcdb53e12e4824d235df3cd268aa
In my case the problem is in the full path to folder with repo where I use terminal & docker. I was something like this:
repo (1)/repo/
so rename folder to
repo/repo
and it will help
In my case the reason was invisible characters after copy/paste from Notes. Replacing them with spaces helped
One of the problems I had is that in my configs of skaffold config list -a, my default-repo was set to https://docker-registry.url.com as seen below:
kubeContexts:
- kube-context: minikube
default-repo: https://docker-registry.url.com
but instead, the correct way should have been without https://:
kubeContexts:
- kube-context: minikube
default-repo: docker-registry.url.com
Run it on CMD instead of PowerShell if you are using Windows.
In case anyone else hits it, yet another variant that results in this error is caused by a trailing / or \ on your path specification.
i.e. -v c:\mystuff:c:\mappedfolder works
but: -v c:\mystuff\:c:\mappedfolder does not
Where there is the extra "\" at the end of mystuff
So in my case, the problem was that the command was "illegal", aka. in a format that was not supported, which was the last thing expected since I found it in the official documentation, but it is what it is. Make sure you are using the right command.
Another case when this can show up is when you're missing the image to be run.
Just a heads-up: if any folder of you path has a space in it, remove it. For example if one of the folder's name is my folder, change it into my-folder.
If you run the script in windows PowerShell you need to replace $(pwd) to ${pwd} with curly brackets.
Remove the \ and just write your command continuously.
Write it like this
docker run -p 8888:8888 -v `pwd`/../src:/src -v `pwd`/../data:/data -w /src supervisely_anpr --rm -it bash
instead of
docker run \
-p 8888:8888
-v `pwd`/../src:/src \
-v `pwd`/../data:/data -w /src supervisely_anpr \
--rm \
-it \
bash
I had a scenario where a note program had replaced -- (0x2D0x2D) with — (0x2014). When I spotted an invalid switch, I typed an extra - but ended up with —- (0x20140x2D) and not 0x2D0x2D
In my case, the issue was empty space after the '\'. Copy and paste the whole command into an editor configured to show the hidden characters (VSCode, Notepad++, sublime) and choose the file type to be bash the editor will show the incorrect '\'
