It’s only tiny, but in a development environment with a huge source tree and lots of reads and writes, it adds up, and can visibly affect performance. it’s in the nature of virtualization that there is always an unavoidable small overhead in crossing the host-VM boundary. This is definitely not a desired outcome if you want to share code your need to edit.Īs to the other two options, as Turner explains, bind mounts are the most flexible solution, but their performance is inferior to shared volumes. However, each mechanism comes with its own balance of pros and cons which makes them suitable for different use cases.Ĭopying files to a container has the major drawback that all data copied over, including any modification to it, will be lost when the container is removed.

Additionally, you can copy a part of your file system inside the container's own file system.Įach approach serves the same goal of sharing files between the local file system and the container's (as well as among distinct containers').

In a recent article, Docker engineer Stephen Turner shared a few best practices to help developers understand file sharing between a Docker container and its local host and how its performance varies across OSes.ĭocker Desktop provides two mechanisms to share a part of the local file system with a container, namely, bind mount and named volumes.

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