How to persist data in a dockerized postgres database using volumes

Strangely enough, the solution ended up being to change

volumes:  - ./postgres-data:/var/lib/postgresql

to

volumes:  - ./postgres-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data

You can create a common volume for all Postgres data

 docker volume create pgdata

or you can set it to the compose file

   version: "3"   services:     db:       image: postgres       environment:         - POSTGRES_USER=postgres         - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=postgress         - POSTGRES_DB=postgres       ports:         - "5433:5432"       volumes:         - pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data       networks:         - suruse   volumes:      pgdata:

It will create volume name pgdata and mount this volume to container's path.

You can inspect this volume

docker volume inspect pgdata// output will be[    {        "Driver": "local",        "Labels": {},        "Mountpoint": "/var/lib/docker/volumes/pgdata/_data",        "Name": "pgdata",        "Options": {},        "Scope": "local"    }]

I would avoid using a relative path. Remember that docker is a daemon/client relationship.

When you are executing the compose, it's essentially just breaking down into various docker client commands, which are then passed to the daemon. That ./database is then relative to the daemon, not the client.

Now, the docker dev team has some back and forth on this issue, but the bottom line is it can have some unexpected results.

In short, don't use a relative path, use an absolute path.