In this How to Make Tech Work tutorial, Jack Wallen shows how to create a Docker volume that can be used for any number of containers.

A Docker volume is a handy way to deploy a container with persistent storage or to share data between two containers. With this handy trick, you could deploy multiple websites that use the same volume housing their data. It’s a great feature that helps to give Docker more flexibility. I want to show you how to create and use a Docker volume, so you can enjoy simplified data sharing and persistent data with your containers.

The first thing you must do is create a new volume. Let’s call it shared-data, and the command for this would be

docker volume create --name shared-data

The directory housing that volume on Linux is /var/lib/docker/volumes.

Let’s deploy a Ubuntu container that uses the new volume with the command

docker run -ti -v shared-data:/shared-data ubuntu

This will land us on the running container’s bash prompt where we can create a file in the shared directory with the command

echo "Hello, TechRepublic" >> /shared-data/test.txt

Exit from that container, and stop it with the

exit

command.

Let’s deploy a second container that uses the same volume with the command

docker run -ti -v shared-data:/shared-data ubuntu

You should see that the new container has the test.txt file that was saved within the volume. Test that with the command

cat /shared-data/test.txt

and you should see Hello, TechRepublic.

Congratulations! You have just created your first Docker volume that can be used for any number of containers.

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If you are interested in learning more about Docker, check out the following resources in TechRepublic Academy: