How to persist data in a dockerized postgres database using volumes

Question

My docker compose file has three containers, web, nginx, and postgres. Postgres looks like this:

postgres:
  container_name: postgres
  restart: always
  image: postgres:latest
  volumes:
    - ./database:/var/lib/postgresql
  ports:
    - "5432:5432

My goal is to mount a volume which corresponds to a local folder called ./database inside the postgres container as /var/lib/postgres. When I start these containers and insert data into postgres, I verify that /var/lib/postgres/data/base/ is full of the data I'm adding (in the postgres container), but in my local system, ./database only gets a data folder in it, i.e. ./database/data is created, but it's empty. Why?

Notes:

• This suggests my above file should work.
• This person is using docker services which is interesting

UPDATE 1

Per Nick's suggestion, I did a docker inspect and found:

    "Mounts": [
        {
            "Source": "/Users/alex/Documents/MyApp/database",
            "Destination": "/var/lib/postgresql",
            "Mode": "rw",
            "RW": true,
            "Propagation": "rprivate"
        },
        {
            "Name": "e5bf22471215db058127109053e72e0a423d97b05a2afb4824b411322efd2c35",
            "Source": "/var/lib/docker/volumes/e5bf22471215db058127109053e72e0a423d97b05a2afb4824b411322efd2c35/_data",
            "Destination": "/var/lib/postgresql/data",
            "Driver": "local",
            "Mode": "",
            "RW": true,
            "Propagation": ""
        }
    ],

Which makes it seem like the data is being stolen by another volume I didn't code myself. Not sure why that is. Is the postgres image creating that volume for me? If so, is there some way to use that volume instead of the volume I'm mounting when I restart? Otherwise, is there a good way of disabling that other volume and using my own, ./database?

UPDATE 2

I found the solution, thanks to Nick! (and another friend) Answer below.

Answer 1

Strangely enough, the solution ended up being to change

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

to

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