Where are Docker volumes located when running WSL using Docker Desktop?

Matthias picture Matthias · Apr 7, 2020 · Viewed 14.3k times · Source

I am running Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) with Ubuntu as client OS under Windows 10. Now I installed Docker Desktop on the Windows host and enabled the WSL integration in the Docker settings. That works fine so far, I can access the Docker daemon running on the Windows host from my WSL Ubuntu client.

Now I am wondering where all the Docker volumes and other data is stored in this setup. Usually these are under /var/lib/docker, but it seems when using WSL this is not the case. When running df -h I can see the following Docker-related lines:

/dev/sdd        251G  3.1G  236G   2% /mnt/wsl/docker-desktop-data/isocache
/dev/sdc        251G  120M  239G   1% /mnt/wsl/docker-desktop/shared-sockets
/dev/loop0      244M  244M     0 100% /mnt/wsl/docker-desktop/cli-tools

So they are somewhere on the Windows host it seems.
... but where?

Answer

Pierre picture Pierre · Oct 19, 2020

When I create a volume named shared_data in docker, I can find it under

\\wsl$\docker-desktop-data\version-pack-data\community\docker\volumes\shared_data\_data