Database (and Server) Is Created Every Time

[Mike-E-angelo]

Hi Community,

I am investigating Aspire, and am having moderate luck. Everything seems to be working OK. However, one aspect I just learned is that during local development it appears the database + server (container) are created new each and every time, erasing the old server + database altogether.

This can be problematic. :)

I am new to containers and this world. Is there a way to keep the container retaining the data that it had from the previous local development run?

Thank you for any assistance you can provide.

[ryanheath]

Try something like this, here we use sqlserver.

IResourceBuilder<SqlServerServerResource> sqlServer;
if (builder.ExecutionContext.IsPublishMode)
{
    sqlServer = builder.AddSqlServer(SqlServerName);
}
else
{
    sqlServer = builder.AddSqlServer(SqlServerName)
        .WithDataVolume();
}

// Ryan

[davidfowl]

Right you can use volumes to persist data. There's a method WithDataVolume that will configure various containers to persist data in a docker (or podman) volume. This will make sure the data doesn't go away between runs.

[Mike-E-angelo]

Thank you very much for the additional context! 🙏 I have suggested updating documentation to reduce this sort of confusion for future users here:
dotnet/docs-aspire#1574