I see what you’re saying. At the moment I’m weighing up the complexity of setting this up in containers (I’ve been struggling with docker for a couple of days and found it hard to get to grips with). I originally chose this path because I liked the idea that the container encapsulated all of the resources required for the solution (app, database and file system), which would have made it really easy to deploy, and also to backup and migrate (if necessary).
It looks like if I continue with this approach then I will have 3 interdependent components (mediawiki container, database container, host database storage), which would not only take me an eternity to work out how to configure and link, but would also not be as simple to backup or migrate as I’d hoped.
Since this is all sitting on a VM my backup requirements are pretty simple (I’m just backup up the whole VM), so the primary benefit of ease of deployment doesn’t seem to apply to me in this case.