Nginx with Persistent Volume

Spinning up nginx without volume

$ docker run -p 8080:80 --name web --rm nginx

Go to http://localhost:8080 to view the default page.
Once you exit the container, it'll be deleted because of --rm flag

Modify the default file

$ vi index.html

# web because that's the container name
$ docker cp index.html web:/usr/share/nginx/html

Persisting your changes

From the last example, if we stop and start the container again, our index.html changes will be lost since they are not persistent. This can be solved by attaching a volume to it. Run the below command instead:

$ docker run -p 8080:80 --name web --rm -v web:/usr/share/nginx/html nginx

# Here the name web after option -v is the name of the volume.
# Path following colon(:) is the directory we want to be persistent.

# Now copy the index.html

Persisting from Host Machine

Very similar to the last option. Instead of specifying the name of the volume, we specify the directory on host.

$ docker run -p 8080:80 --name web --rm -v $PWD:/usr/share/nginx/html nginx

# Notice that the volume name "web" is replaced by whatever PWD (current directory) is.
# Also note that the container does not need to be restarted for updates to show.

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Last update: March 8, 2023