Painless Docker - 2nd Edition

Named Volumes vs Anonymous Volumes

When we created the volume my-vol, we used the command:

docker volume create my-vol

This is called a named volume. We can also create anonymous volumes.

Anonymous volumes are volumes that aren't given a specific name. They're created when we use the -v flag without specifying a name:

docker run --name postgres-with-anon-vol \
    -v /var/lib/postgresql/data \
    -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=mysecretpassword -d \
    postgres:16

If you inspect the container to get the volume name, you will see that it's a random string: