Docker Compose Wordpress Image wp-content directory looks like got merge instead of overwritten

[ramli-hartono]

My project directory looks like the following let's say the directory called myawesomeproject and is located at ~/src/myawesomeproject, and inside that is the following

wp-content
 - mu-plugins
 - plugins
 - theme
   - newtheme
docker-compose.yml

and my docker-compose.yml

  # wordpress
  wordpress:
    depends_on: 
      - db
    image: wordpress:latest
    ports:
      - "8000:80"
    restart: always
    volumes:
      - ./wp-content:/var/www/html/wp-content

My question is when I run docker compose up -d
the wp-content directory seems like getting merged I can see my host machine become

wp-content
 - mu-plugins
 - plugins
 - theme
   - newtheme
   - twentytwentyfour
   - twentytwentythree
docker-compose.yml

Why is that? I was hoping the both the container and my host machine have my original project directory instead

wp-content
 - mu-plugins
 - plugins
 - theme
   - newtheme
docker-compose.yml

How can I fix this?

[LaurentGoderre]

That would happen if the new folders are created at runtime in the container. That would be the expected behavior for volume mounting.

[tianon]

The merging you're seeing is that the container "installs" WordPress on initial startup if it is not already installed. If you want to avoid that, I think you'll need to figure out how to mount to /usr/src/wordpress/wp-content instead and run directly from that directory (but it's been a while since I've personally configured this image to do so, so I don't remember everything involved -- there are other issues in this repository where that's been done successfully to use it in a more "read-only" fashion).

A "quick" fix would be to mount an empty directory at /usr/src/wordpress/wp-content so that you don't get any of the image content during that WordPress install (--tmpfs /usr/src/wordpress/wp-content, for example).