Docker Compose Storage Types

12 February 2025

Docker, IaC

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Docker Compose is a declarative tool that allows you to create YAML scripts to deploy Docker containers in a standardised fashion.

You may choose how the containers store persistent files on the host, so that when they are stopped, the data is not destroyed.

There are 3 options…

Anonymous Volumes

• Only a target is specified, so Docker will create an anonymous directory and mount it as a volume to the target path in the container
• An example specification would be: /var/www/html
• The mapped directory on the host will be /var/lib/docker/volumes/**UUID**/_data, where UUID is a random ID

Named Volumes

• You can specify the name of a volume which will be created in the /var/lib/docker/volumes directory
• In the example specification below, webroot is the name of your volume and /var/www/html is the target path in the container

services:
  nginx:
    ...
    volumes:
      - webroot:/var/www/html
    volumes:
      webroot:

Bind Mounts

• You can bind a source path on the host to a target path in the container
• An example specification would be: /home/rob/webroot:/var/www/html
• The source path on the host would be /home/rob/webroot and the the target path in the container would be /var/www/html