Some quick notes on docker volumes

I’m a docker n00b. And working through the different manuals and tutorials, I came to take notes on these basic conclusions (might be obvious for the experienced whale rider)

If you start a container without volumes and change files, the changes will be kept within that container.
If you stop and restart, the changes will still be there
If you stop and rm and then start a new container of the image, the changes will be gone

If you add a “volume” to your conainer at a mountpoint, two things happen:
1) the initial data of the IMAGE at that path will be COPIED to the new volume in /var/lib/docker/volumes/*heregoestheverylogndockerid*/_data
2) the data you edit in that mountpoint will be visible/editable there
The volume itself will not have a name and will not automatically be shared with other containers of the same image, but you CAN reference it into another container by doing

docker run -it --name dataaccessor --volumes-from runningcontainerwithvolumes ubuntu bash

You’ll be in a new container, running a bash, and have the same mounts/mappings as the “runningcontainerwithvolumes” has. So you can edit the data.

This is basically the same concept as using “data volume containers”
This is not something special, but basically we are “abusing” a named, STOPPED container WITH volumes as a reference for mounting its volues into other containers

Clean up unused images

docker run -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v /var/lib/docker:/var/lib/docker --rm martin/docker-cleanup-volumes --dry-run

Obviously, you can remove the --dry-run if it looks OK