Directory Checksum

This tool recursively computes the checksum of the contents of a directory, and prints the checksums up to a depth you can specify.

Symbolic links are not followed. They appear in the tool's output, and their hash is computed for the link's target path rather than their content.

This tool is a proper (as in: actually working) alternative to tools that ignore empty directories, such as md5deep, or chaining UNIX such as find and md5sum (see e.g. here).

See here for background information why I wrote this tool. Its primary use case is to debug layer caching issues with Docker, BuildKit, Buildah or other OCI image builder tools, which rebuild a layer with a COPY or ADD statement, even though you think it should not have been rebuilt, because none of the files have changed.

Example output

Running directory-checksum for the current working directory, printing up to 4 levels.

$ directory-checksum --max-depth=4 .

7c47daae101786a01cccf330884ba7c7a3ecb91e D .
a6bb67a68b83ce1daabc176df5591f03bd9c2078 D .idea
7328aae6b9c0f5d22065fb856dd373ab4b999f3b D .idea\inspectionProfiles
e30fb4cb0ba9888edb9f327b0a8e391bd6df2f97 F .idea\inspectionProfiles\Project_Default.xml
f407904694bc6b866c2c0c732828ef8478450583 F .idea\.gitignore
ce2de3130718fd2af4d75e902ed17e43f4d4a7a3 F .idea\golang-exp1.iml
46ba4606e52739668fc028814845a40235a9675c F .idea\modules.xml
89514dec2f816a283d6616bb9bbf686e199f2a3b F .idea\workspace.xml
56d5471f798fd45fcef20db937e4c2ed26aea0d2 D directory_checksum
8b6d8131a485c39454dbd5e2d9ff0be6a0151c6f F directory_checksum\checksum_utils.go        
fdc1a074e561ccde414db93bcde7512f968e4fc2 F directory_checksum\checksum_utils_test.go   
8e7f1326626b0850e485d3f7a80a5f5aed214eb3 F directory_checksum\dict_utils.go
f7ad8b95c6b22ee16b6cb56374b23f6107005159 F directory_checksum\dict_utils_test.go       
0497158638db643c2c6b1ae732b5290f59fb28e2 F directory_checksum\directory.go
2dfe102720acd43ba58333de36704e764bc77341 F directory_checksum\fs_scanner.go
e04c3bbede11f5d49309619396afd35eab361d59 F directory_checksum\fs_scanner_test.go       
0740118c1fdc3944256368be553b7e074a573fb3 F .gitignore
0e8c89b6a2f9d6067805f4f9b3b30d53c9cae8e9 F README.md
9a06b436f851ccd8756d10566109451ba429208b F go.mod
04cf991671c86b0226ac06bcfcdd70d3aeb33687 F go.sum
d1fbe91a2253ba9de3ced8f95ea7a8b30d436727 F main.go

Explanation of columns:

• First column shows SHA-1 checksum of files and directories.
  • For normal files, only the binary file content is used for computing the checksum, all other meta-data (e.g. owner or creation date) are ignored
  • For directories, the checksum is computed on a long string that represents the listing of the directory's immediate children, only considering their names and checksums (note: for files, we additionally take into account whether it is a normal file, or a symbolic link)
  • For symbolic links (which are files whose "content" is an absolute or relative target path), the checksum is computed on the target path
• Second column: D=directory, F=file, S=symbolic link (file)
• Third column: the path relative to the scanned directory's path

Note: the first line always shows the checksum of the scanned directory itself.

Use case: debug image build caching issues

A common problem is that commands such as docker build ... rebuild an image layer (for an ADD or COPY statement in a Dockerfile) even though it should not have done so: from your point of view, none of the files have changed, and therefore the image layer cache should have been used, instead of rebuilding the layer.

Thanks to Directory Checksum, you can now easily debug the problem, by modifying your Dockerfile as follows:

• Add the directory-checksum binary to your image, in some layer that precedes the problematic COPY/ADD layer:
  • You may want to use a statement such as ADD <URL> /usr/local/bin/directory-checksum followed by RUN chmod +x /usr/local/bin/directory-checksum, to avoid that you first have install curl. Replace <URL> with the appropriate binary release of Directory Checksum.
  • If you use BuildKit, Buildah or some other build engine that supports ADD --chmod, you can use ADD --chmod=755 <URL> /usr/local/bin/directory-checksum. You may need to put the line # syntax=docker/dockerfile:1 as first line into your Dockerfile to use an updated frontend, see here
• Add a statement such as RUN directory-checksum --max-depth 2 . to print the checksums of the directory.
  • Replace 2 with any other depth-level, if desired. A too large number will produce too much output, a too small number may provide too few details (especially when something changed in the deeper levels of the folder hierarchy).
  • Replace . with any other path that is either a relative path to your WORKDIR, or an absolute path.

Note: we run directory-checksum inside the build container (not on the host) so that the filtering applied by the .dockerignore file is already accounted for.

Now, to find out why the image layer cache has not been used for your COPY/ADD layer, you simple compare the output of directory-checksum between two docker build executions. Once you determined the files or directories that have changed, you can tweak your .dockerignore file accordingly (or file a bug with your container build engine if your files really have not changed).

Building and testing

This is a simple CLI application implemented in Go, thus I assume that you are familiar with how to build Go applications (go build) or how to run tests (go test ./... -v).