Files written by container not visible on host

Open Source Projects DockerEngine
1

On my dev machine I’m running MongoDB inside a docker container (Docker Native 1.13.0-rc2-beta31, MacOSX).
Here’s the docker-compose.yml:

version: '2'
services:
  mongo:
    image: mongo
    ports:
    - 27017:27017
    volumes:
    - ./mongo-data:/data

It starts smoothly and creates 2 directories inside of ./mongo-data: db and configdb.
Now the strange thing:

  • if I ls ./mongo-data/db or ls ./mongo-data/configdb from the host I don’t get any file listed
  • if I do the same (ls /data/db or ls /data/configdb) from inside the container I see the MongoDB files I’m expecting to see there

What’s goin on here?

One more thing: if I erase the directories from the host they and their content get erased from the container as well.

Any help on this?

Update

On thing that’s even more strange is that when I delete the files from the host the mongo process goes nuts, but if I restart via docker-compose up --force-recreate the files I deleted seem to be there again untouched (in the container).

2

Still unable to understand what’s going on here but I found something that seems to be working for my dev purposes: specify the data directory with the --dbpath flag.
In my specific case the docker-compose.yml gets a new line:

command: ["--dbpath=/data"]

Hope it helps someone. Also hope somebody can explain me why it is!