Is there any way to read contents of a Docker volume without attaching it to a container?

Question

Suppose I created a Docker volume like so:

docker volume create my-volume

The volume was then used by some container and data was written to it.

Is there any way to read the contents of the volume from the host machine without attaching it to a container. Answer should not include reading it from /var/lib/docker... as that path can change from machine to machine and OS to OS.

So I am looking for a command like

docker cat my-volume:/path/inside/this/volume/file.txt

Answer 1

Is there any way to read the contents of the volume from the host machine without attaching it to a container?

No.

On the other hand, the recipe to read an individual file from a temporary container isn't that much more complicated than what you show:

docker run --rm -v my-volume:/my-volume -w /my-volume busybox \
  cat ./path/inside/this/volume/file.txt

Instead of cat , you can run any other command; so if you wanted to copy the contents of the volume out to the local system, for example, you could similarly run

docker run --rm -v my-volume:/my-volume -w /my-volume busybox \
  tar cf - . \
| tar xvf -