Stateful Docker Containers

There are two ways to approach stateful containers:

1. Mount a volume with -v <host-dir>:<container-dir>
2. Create Data Containers

Data Containers

A Data Container is only used to store and manage data. We'll use busybox as a lightweight base, and supply the -v option to define where other containers will read and store data.

docker create -v /config --name dataContainer busybox

Next we can copy our files into the container with cp. We'll copy some file "config.conf" into our data container's /config directory.

docker cp config.conf dataContainer:/config/

When we're starting other containers, we can reference this dataContainer with the --volumes-from flag.

docker run --volumes-from dataContainer ubuntu ls /config

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