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Docker Storage Tutorial

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Docker has two main categories of data storage, the persistent and the non-persistent.

Persistent Data Storage

Persistent data storage are the volumes which are decoupled from the containers.

Volumes:

  • Use a volume for persistent data:
    • Create the volume first, then create your container.
  • Mounted to a directory in the container
  • Data is written to the volume
  • Deleting a container does not delete the volume
  • First-class citizens
  • Uses the local driver
  • Third party drivers:
    • Block storage
    • File storage
    • Object storage
  • Storage locations:
    • Linux: /var/lib/docker/volumes/
    • Windows: C:\ProgramData\Docker\volumes

Non-Persistent Data Storage

  • Non-persistent
    • Local storage
    • Data that is ephemeral
    • Every container has it
    • Tied to the lifecycle of the contain
  • By default all container use local storage
  • Storage locations:
    • Linux: /var/lib/docker/[STORAGE-DRIVER]/
    • Windows: C:\ProgramData\Docker\windowsfilter\
  • Storage Drivers:
    • RHEL uses overlay2.
    • Ubuntu uses overlay2 or aufs.
    • SUSE uses btrfs.
    • Windows uses its own.

Volume Commands

List all Docker volume commands:

docker volume -h
  • create: Create a volume.
  • inspect: Display detailed information on one or more volumes.
  • ls: List volumes.
  • prune: Remove all unused local volumes.
  • rm: Remove one or more volumes.

List all volumes:

docker volume ls

Create two new volumes:

docker volume create test-volume1
docker volume create test-volume2

Get the flags available when creating a volume:

docker volume create -h

Inspecting a volume:

docker volume inspect test-volume1

Deleting a volume:

docker volume rm test-volume

Removing all unused volumes:

docker volume prune

Bind Mounts

Bind mounts have been around since the early days of Docker. They have limited functionality compared to volumes. With bind mount, a file or directory on the host machine is mounted into a container.

Volumes use a new directory that is created within Docker’s storage directory on the host machine, and Docker manages that directory’s contents.

Using the mount flag:

docker container run -d --name <NAME> --mount type=bind, source=<SOURCE>, target=<TARGET> <IMAGE>

Using the volume flag:

docker container run -d --name <NAME> -v <SOURCE>:<TARGET> <IMAGE>

Let’s provide a walk through example of how to run a container with volumes. We are in our working directory, and we create a folder called mysource which will be connected with our docker container under the mytarget folder, where in our case is the nginx. Let’s run the command (Note that I am on Windows that is the reason for the backslash in the source path):

docker container run -d --name nginx_with_volume -v  C:\ForTheBlog\VolumeExample\mysource:/mytarget nginx

Now, let’s say that we create a new file called myfile1.txt, in our local PC under the mysource folder:

Docker Storage Tutorial 1

Now, we expect to find the file1.txt within the container under the mytarget folder. Let’s run the bash command in an interactive terminal (-it):

docker exec -it nginx_with_volume bash

We’re inside the container. We can search for the files and directories with the ls command:

ls -ltr
Docker Storage Tutorial 2

We can change directory (cd) to mytarget:

cd mytarget
ls -ltr
Docker Storage Tutorial 3

As we can see the file1.txt mounted from our local PC inside the container. Finally, let’s create a new file called file2.txt within the container under the mytarget folder.

touch file2.txt
echo "A file created within the container" > file2.txt
Docker Storage Tutorial 4

We expect to find the file2.txt in our local PC under the mysource folder. As we can see it is there!

Docker Storage Tutorial 5
Docker Storage Tutorial 6

Remove the Container

Since we are done with this tutorial, it is time to clean our mess :). So, let’s stop and then remove the container.

docker stop nginx_with_volume
docker rm nginx_with_volume

Reference

[1] Linux Academy

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