I have 2,000 Excel files that I need to access from one of my containers.

I have 2,000 Excel files that I need to access from one of my containers. I'll put them inside of a folder called backend/data that is used to build my REST API service using Django. In my Dockerfile i do ADD . /code/, which would add all of the files to the image, which I don't want. Should I put a .dockerignore file in the data folder and ignore everything in the folder? I would then do - ./backend/data:/code/backend/data in my docker compose file. Does this make sense? Is there a better way?