Many people imagine that Docker Desktop is just a UI on top of some open source tools, but that’s only a small part of what it is. To understand the performance differences between the options, we first have to talk briefly about how Docker Desktop works. You can also browse their contents from the Docker Desktop UI, using the Volumes tab that we added recently (and that is now free for all users including Docker Personal). These volumes persist even after the container has been deleted, and can be shared with other containers. You can create a named volume with a command like docker volume create new_vol, and then share it into the container using the -v flag again:ĭocker run -it -v new_vol:/my_files ubuntu bash The second option, a named volume, is a filesystem managed by Docker. This is very simple and convenient, but if you’re using Docker Desktop a named volume may have better performance, for reasons I’ll explain in the next section. Then the files at /users/stephen will be available at /my_files in the container, and you can read and write to them there. For example, if you runĭocker run -it -v /users/stephen:/my_files ubuntu bash The first option most people encounter is the bind mount, where part of your local filesystem is shared with the container. Both of these use the -v flag to docker run to specify some files to share with the container.

So the natural next questions are, how can I see my other files? And how can my container write data that I can read later and maybe use in other containers? This is where bind mounts and volumes come in. You’ll quickly find that (1) the container has its own filesystem, based on the filesystem in the Ubuntu image (2) you can create, delete and modify files, but your changes are local to the container and are lost when the container is deleted (3) the container doesn’t have access to any other files on your host computer. Suppose you run an Ubuntu container with docker run -it ubuntu bash.

How do I see my source code inside my container? What’s the difference between a volume and a bind mount? Why is file sharing slower than on Linux, and how can I speed it up? In this blog post, I’ll cover the options you have, some tips and tricks, and finish with a sneak preview of what we’re currently working on. One of the topics users of Docker Desktop often ask us about is file sharing.

Docker for mac file sharing