How to persist data in a dockerized postgres database using volumes

Question

My docker compose file has three containers, web, nginx, and postgres. Postgres looks like this:

postgres:
  container_name: postgres
  restart: always
  ima         


        

Answer 1

You can create a common volume for all Postgres data

 docker volume create pgdata

or you can set it to the compose file

   version: "3"
   services:
     db:
       image: postgres
       environment:
         - POSTGRES_USER=postgres
         - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgress
         - POSTGRES_DB=postgres
       ports:
         - "5433:5432"
       volumes:
         - pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data
       networks:
         - suruse
   volumes: 
     pgdata:

It will create volume name pgdata and mount this volume to container's path.

You can inspect this volume

docker volume inspect pgdata

// output will be
[
    {
        "Driver": "local",
        "Labels": {},
        "Mountpoint": "/var/lib/docker/volumes/pgdata/_data",
        "Name": "pgdata",
        "Options": {},
        "Scope": "local"
    }
]

Answer 2

Strangely enough, the solution ended up being to change

volumes:
  - ./postgres-data:/var/lib/postgresql

to

volumes:
  - ./postgres-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data

Answer 3

I think you just need to create your volume outside docker first with a docker create -v /location --name and then reuse it.

And by the time I used to use docker a lot, it wasn't possible to use a static docker volume with dockerfile definition so my suggestion is to try the command line (eventually with a script ) .

Answer 4

I would avoid using a relative path. Remember that docker is a daemon/client relationship.

When you are executing the compose, it's essentially just breaking down into various docker client commands, which are then passed to the daemon. That ./database is then relative to the daemon, not the client.

Now, the docker dev team has some back and forth on this issue, but the bottom line is it can have some unexpected results.

In short, don't use a relative path, use an absolute path.