Docker Compose

Docker Compose

Docker-Compose was previously known as Fig until the Orchardup team joined Docker. ‘docker-compose’, like ‘fig’, is a orchestration and provisioning tool for Docker. It provides an array of options, configured using a YML file to control the Docker daemon to spin up sets of containers and help them interact by defining port connections, names, volumes, and other parameters in a way that is controlled, repeatable, orders dependencies, and can be version-controlled.

Usage for docker-compose

These notes were orginally for the older version of Fig, prior to the change of name. Aside from the name change which will see the command become ‘docker-compose’ they should be more-or-less compatible until new features are added.

The requirements for docker-compose appear to be Python 2.7 and pip to install (although there are alternative methods, and I suspect the change of ownership will see further changes).

To install docker-compose using pip

For me this was the easiest way to install docker-compose, as I already had pip installed. There is an install available via Homebrew, but as the docker-compose install guide mentions pip I prefer this method, particularly as this works on Linux too.

sudo pip install -U docker-compose 

To install ‘docker-compose’ instead, install docker-compose.

sudo pip install -U docker-compose 

However, I find it tiring and irritating to have to type 14 characters instead of three, and for some reason auto-complete doesn’t seem to want to help me much, so I add an alias to my shell.

alias fig="docker-compose" 

Now I can keep pretending it’s called Fig. For your sake though, I’ve done a search-and-replace to change fig into docker-compose, in the hope it makes these notes more useful and less confusing. Really though, they are the same.

If you don’t have pip, then maybe you don’t have python installed. If you do, then asking Homebrew gives this useful message:

$ brew search pip
...

If you meant "pip" precisely:

Homebrew provides pip via: `brew install python`. However you will then
have two Pythons installed on your Mac, so alternatively you can:
    sudo easy_install pip

If the docker-compose command fails to run

In the event there is a problem with docker-compose, you may need to run some upgrades of pip to get a later version of docker-compose.

sudo pip install --upgrade distribute 

docker-compose up

Spinning up a new set of Docker containers is really easy with docker-compose, you just need to use one simple and easy-to-remember command:

docker-compose up

This will build or reinstate containers and start them using Docker. It doesn’t rebuild containers if the Dockerfile has changed.

docker-compose build

If you change the docker-compose.yml (or fig.yml if you are old-skool it will still work albeit with a warning of deprecation) or the Dockerfile, you will need to rebuild the containers. Similarly if you add a new container you should build it using this command.

docker-compose build

This will scan the docker-compose.yml file and build or download any Docker images that it needs.

If you use boot2docker: Fix certificate problems

Sometimes docker-compose complains about certificate problems, but thankfully this is easy to fix by setting an environment variable. Unfortunately, you probably don’t want to set this universally as it will interfere with other tools that use CA requests such as curl. This command will do this on a temporary basis:

REQUESTS_CA_BUNDLE=~/.boot2docker/certs/boot2docker-vm/ca.pem docker-compose up

This sets the variable to the path to the boot2docker certificate then calls docker-compose. You can also create an alias to this if you prefer.