How to See the Contents of a Docker Volume

Today I discovered a neat trick to view the contents of a volume with Docker as described here. This should work on any host environment - I tested this in Mac but see no reason why it should not work on other hosts.

Firstly to see what volumes you have run:

docker volume ls

To get more details about a particular volume from the list run:

docker volume inspect somevolumename

To actually see the contents of the volume run:

docker run -v somevolumename:/somevolumename -it ubuntu:19.04 bash

You should be logged in to an Ubuntu image that mounts this volume. From within the container to check what is in the volume simply run:

cd /somevolumename

You should now be inside the volume. This trick can also be used to mount a volume you may need to clean but cannot due to some other container that is stuck with some error.