wp-env: Keep uploads on a Docker volume

[ttencate]

What problem does this address?

After re-creating the Docker containers, for example after modifying .wp-env.json, the database is kept, but uploads are not. This surprised me. It is pretty annoying behaviour when working on a plugin that relies on uploaded images, because now the image files are all gone.

What is your proposed solution?

A persistent Docker volume could be mounted on /var/www/html/wp-content/uploads. This would work similarly to /var/lib/mysql in the MySQL container. These two volumes should probably be cleared at the same moments, because an upload without a corresponding database entry is fairly useless, and a database with entries for nonexistent uploads is also fairly useless.

With plain docker-compose, this feature would be trivial to add. I don't know anything about the internals of wp-env but I'm hoping it's similarly easy.

Workaround

Use "mappings" to put uploads in a directory on the host. This is imperfect at best, because they will end up owned by whatever user has ID 33 on the host system (which maps to www-data in the container).