VOLUME uselessly copies data to host

[cm2walki]

VOLUME uselessly copies data to host

[CM2Walki]

Hey @gdlx,

I assume with restarting you mean recreating the container which causes it to allocate a new volume (which is intended behaviour). The image doesn't have bind mount support, as you already noticed, because it really doesn't need it. What you are looking for is a named volume:

$ docker volume create steamcmd_volume # Create named volume
$ docker run -it -v "steamcmd_volume:/home/steam/steamcmd" --name=steamcmd cm2network/steamcmd bash # Start the container with the volume mounted

This way it will remain persistent over container recreations. You can even mount the same named steamcmd volume into multiple containers. That way you save space by using the same installation for multiple game servers. (I used this extensively in my steampipe image).

As to the reason why the VOLUME instruction is there, simply because a steamcmd installation is not static content, each time you launch it, it updates itself. Remember in the regular docker storage driver it will create a new layer for every change. So each update to steamcmd would keep growing the layers unnecessarily.