In that situation you can use LD_LIBRARY_PATH, that's what it is for. But what you really want in that case is to link the application statically. If you don't

In that situation you can use LD_LIBRARY_PATH, that's what it is for. But what you really want in that case is to link the application statically. If you don't want to have benefits of shared objects: - smaller binary - memory savings (if multiple programs are using the same library, it is loaded once) - less files to patch to fix a security vulnerability The share objects have these features but it comes at price of lower performance, so by putting all .so files into a single docker file instead of statically compiling your application you're getting worst out of both worlds.