Bind Mounting

With Bind Mounting, in local environment, we can edit files in the host machine and that is used inside the container.

Bind mounting is mapping mapping host files and directories into container files and directories. It skips the union file system and on delete a container, do not erase the data from host machine.

If we have files that is mapped to the host files and also exist in the container, in this case the host files will be used.

To test the Bind Mounting we will use the nginx image. First create a file index.html as follows,

touch index.html

Make our index.html file as simple as possible,

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Docker Volumes Testing</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    Hello From Bind Mounting
  </body>
</html>

Now create a container of the nginx image to use this index.html,

docker container run -d --name nginx -p 80:80 -v "$(pwd)":/usr/share/nginx/html nginx

Now if we browse http://localhost/ from browser, we should see the the nginx server is serving our index.html instead of the container itself.

If you are in the windows machine, instead of "$(pwd)", for PowerShell use ${pwd} and for cmd.exe "Command Prompt use: %cd%

If we change the content of the index.html and reload the browser with address http://localhost/, we should see the new content from the index.html.