I'm trying to go deeper in my understanding of Docker's volume, and I'm having an hard time to figure out the differences / use-case of:
- The
docker volume create
command
- The
docker run -v /path:/host_path
- The
VOLUME
entry in the Dockerfile
file
I particularly don't understand what happen if you combine the VOLUME
entry with the -v
flag.
If someone understood well, please explain me!
A volume is a persistent data stored in /var/lib/docker/volumes/...
You can either declare it in a Dockerfile, which means each time a container is started from the image, the volume is created (empty), even if you don't have any -v
option.
You can declare it on runtime docker run -v [host-dir:]container-dir
.
combining the two (VOLUME
+ docker run -v
) means that you can mount the content of a host folder into your volume persisted by the container in /var/lib/docker/volumes/...
docker volume create creates a volume without having to define a Dockerfile and build an image and run a container. It is used to quickly allow other containers to mount said volume.
If you had persisted some content in a volume, but since then deleted the container (which by default does not deleted its associated volume, unless you are using docker rm -v), you can re-attach said volume to a new container (declaring the same volume).
See "Docker - How to access a volume not attached to a container?".
With docker volume create, this is easy to reattached a named volume to a container.
docker volume create --name aname
docker run -v aname:/apath --name acontainer
...
# modify data in /apath
...
docker rm acontainer
# let's mount aname volume again
docker run -v aname:/apath --name acontainer
ls /apath
# you find your data back!