Access Files on your Local Machine in Kestra

Access locally stored files on your machine inside of Kestra Workflows.

In Kestra, you can access files stored on your local machine inside of your Flows.

This can be useful if you have a directory of files you want to process, or code you want to run without having to run them

Setting up Kestra with Docker

If you’re running Kestra with Docker, you’ll need to create a bind mount to a local directory on your machine in order to access files inside of Kestra.

Inside of your Docker Compose file, add the absolute path of the directory on your local machine with a name for this location inside of the container.

In this example, we will add the local path /Users/username/Documents/files to bind to /files inside of the container using - /Users/username/Documents/files:/files

We will put it under volumes in our Docker Compose file:

...
  kestra:
    image: kestra/kestra:latest
    pull_policy: always
    user: "root"
    command: server standalone
    volumes:
      - kestra-data:/app/storage
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock
      - /tmp/kestra-wd:/tmp/kestra-wd
      - /Users/username/Documents/files:/files
...

Now we can access any files and directories inside of /Users/username/Documents/files inside of Kestra in our /files directory.

Access files inside of Script tasks

By default, when you run a Script task, it will run inside of a Docker Task Runner. To access our local files, we can change the Task Runner type to Process so it runs as a subprocess on our Kestra instance.

id: process
namespace: company.team

tasks:
  - id: hello
    type: io.kestra.plugin.scripts.shell.Commands
    taskRunner:
      type: io.kestra.plugin.core.runner.Process
    commands:
      - cat /files/myfile.txt