description | keywords | title |
---|---|---|
Guide to using Docker Compose in production |
compose, orchestration, containers, production |
Use Compose in production |
When you define your app with Compose in development, you can use this definition to run your application in different environments such as CI, staging, and production.
The easiest way to deploy an application is to run it on a single server, similar to how you would run your development environment. If you want to scale up your application, you can run Compose apps on a Swarm cluster.
You probably need to make changes to your app configuration to make it ready for production. These changes may include:
- Removing any volume bindings for application code, so that code stays inside the container and can't be changed from outside
- Binding to different ports on the host
- Setting environment variables differently, such as reducing the verbosity of logging, or to specify settings for external services such as an email server
- Specifying a restart policy like
restart: always
to avoid downtime - Adding extra services such as a log aggregator
For this reason, consider defining an additional Compose file, say
production.yml
, which specifies production-appropriate
configuration. This configuration file only needs to include the changes you'd
like to make from the original Compose file. The additional Compose file
can be applied over the original docker-compose.yml
to create a new configuration.
Once you've got a second configuration file, tell Compose to use it with the
-f
option:
$ docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f production.yml up -d
See Using multiple compose files for a more complete example.
When you make changes to your app code, remember to rebuild your image and
recreate your app's containers. To redeploy a service called
web
, use:
$ docker-compose build web
$ docker-compose up --no-deps -d web
This first rebuilds the image for web
and then stop, destroy, and recreate
just the web
service. The --no-deps
flag prevents Compose from also
recreating any services which web
depends on.
You can use Compose to deploy an app to a remote Docker host by setting the
DOCKER_HOST
, DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY
, and DOCKER_CERT_PATH
environment variables
appropriately.
Once you've set up your environment variables, all the normal docker-compose
commands work with no further configuration.