Docker: Up & Running, 2nd Edition

Chapter 8. Exploring Docker Compose

At this point you should have a good feel for the docker command and how to use it to build, launch, monitor, and debug your applications. Once you are comfortable working with individual containers it won’t be long before you’ll want to share your projects and start building more complex projects that require multiple containers to function properly. This is particularly the case in development environments, where having a whole stack of containers running can easily simulate many production environments on your local machine.

If you’re running a whole stack of containers, however, every container needs to be run with the proper setup to ensure that the underlying application is configured correctly and will run as expected. Getting these settings correct each and every time can be challenging, especially when you are not the person who originally wrote the application. To help with this during development, people often resort to writing shell scripts that can build and run their containers in a consistent manner. Although this works, it can become difficult to understand for a newcomer and hard to maintain as the project changes over time. It’s also not necessarily repeatable between projects.

To help address this problem, Docker, Inc. released a tool primarily aimed at developers called Docker Compose. This tool is included with Docker Community Edition, but you can also install it by following the online installation directions.

Docker Compose ...