When running an application inside a Docker container on Linux and you need to persist files or share files between the host and the container, you indeed use volumes. Docker volumes are the preferred mechanism for persisting data generated by and used by Docker containers.
To mount a volume and persist files, you generally follow these steps:
-
Decide on the Host Directory: First, decide which directory on your host system you want to persist data in. This can be any path, for example,
/home/username/data
. -
Create the Volume (Optional): This step is optional because Docker can automatically create the host path if it doesn't exist when you run the container. However, if you want to configure or use a named volume, you can create one explicitly with:
docker volume create volume_name