I ran into an instance where I needed to use a Docker volume with an absolute path outside of the system the system defined path used when containers are launched…here is a solution I found….

With the local volume driver comes the ability to use arbitrary mounts; by using a bind mount you can achieve exactly this.

For setting up a named volume that gets mounted into /mnt/docker/volumes/mysql-database, your docker-compose.yml would look like this:

volumes:
  database:
    driver: local
    driver_opts:
      type: 'none'
      o: 'bind'
      device: '/mnt/docker/volumes/mysql-database'

By using a bind mount you lose in flexibility since it’s harder to reuse the same volume. But you don’t lose anything in regards of functionality