Starting Directory for Bash

I've a Docker container running. I connect to the container using a command like:

docker exec -it container_name bash

This logs in as root at /var/www/html. I want to know why this directory, and how I would go about changing it. This is actually a web application's container and I do want to start in the web applications content root, but that's on a differently named volume defined in the docker-compose.yml file.

I checked .profile and .bashrc and nothing seems to indicate that it would start in this directory and be obvious to change.

Solution 1:

The working directory in a container is specified with WORKDIR instruction in Dockerfile. You can also change the working by specifying -w parameter for docker run or with working_dir attribute in docker-compose.yml.