This assumes you have installed Docker on Linux and Docker is running. The following command creates a docker volume named foo-volume.

docker volume create foo-volume

The docker volume ls command can be used to display the docker volumes.

docker volume ls

Which should return something like this.

DRIVER        VOLUME NAME
local         foo-volume

Or, as a more practical example, here is now to create a volume that points to an Amazon Web Services Elastic File System (EFS).

sudo docker volume create \
--driver local \
--opt type=nfs \
--opt o=addr=172.31.16.17,nfsvers=4.1,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,hard,timeo=600,retrans=2,noresvport \
--opt device=:/ \
efs

The docker volume inspect command can be used to display the configuration of the volume.

docker volume inspect foo-volume

Which should return JSON something like this. Notice in this example that mountpoint is /var/lib/docker/volumes/foo-volume/_data. This correlates to a directory on the host operating system.

[
 {
  "Driver":"local",
  "Labels":{},
  "Mountpoint":"/var/lib/docker/volumes/foo-volume/_data",
  "Name":"foo-volume",
  "Options":{},
  "Scope":"local"
 }
]

When creating a container using the docker run command, the -v or --volume option can be used to use foo-volume. Do not be thrown off by /usr/local/docker/foo at the end of this command. This is simply the directory that contains the Dockerfile used to create the container.

docker run --volume foo-volume:/app/work /usr/local/docker/foo

Three colon separated values are used with the -v or --volume command line option.

1. The name of a Docker volume or the absolute directory to where data will be stored on the Docker system.
2. The path to where the volume will be mounted in the container.
3. Optional - Comma separated permissions for the mount, such as ro (read only)

In this example, the /var/lib/docker/volumes/foo-volume/_data (foo-volume) directory on the Docker system will be mounted to the /app/work directory in the container.