How To Deal With Persistent Storage (e.g. Databases) In Docker?

The best way to deal with persistent data storage (such as a database) in Docker is to use Docker’s volume API (for docker 1.9.0 or newer) or use data-only containers for older versions of Docker.

Docker 1.9.0 or newer

The best approach for you is to use docker volume API as shown in the following example:

docker volume create --name myvolume
docker run -d -v myvolume:/container/path/for/volume container_image my_command

Let’s break down the example command:

• The first command creates a new volume named myvolume in the current working directory
• The second command runs the container image container_image and configures it to consume the newly created volume myvolume

If you create a container with a -v volume_name:/container/fs/path Docker will automatically create a named volume for you that can:

1. Be listed through the docker volume ls
2. Be identified through the docker volume inspect volume_name
3. Backed up as a regular directory
4. Backed up as before through a --volumes-from connection

You can also identify dangling volumes (unused volumes)

docker volume ls -f dangling=true

And then remove them using their name:

docker volume rm <volume_name>

Docker 1.8.X and older

The approach that seems to work best for production is to use a data-only container. The data-only container is run on a barebones image and does nothing except expose a data volume.

Then you can run any other container to have access to the data container volumes:

docker run --volumes-from data_container some_other_container command_to_exec

You can read more about this technique in the official documentation.

Got an article suggestion? Let us know

Explore more

Docker

How To Deal With Persistent Storage (e.g. Databases) In Docker?

Questions

How to Include Files outside of Docker’s Build Context?

Questions

Solved: Cron missing newline before EOF

This error may also happen when a crontab file is generated automatically and the generator failed to insert a newline character at the end of the crontab file.

Questions

Solved: Errors in crontab file, can't install

You may encounter this error while creating a new crontab or updating an existing one that has a syntax error.

Questions

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.