Using profiles with Compose
Profiles help you adjust your Compose application for different environments or use cases by selectively activating services. Services can be assigned to one or more profiles; unassigned services start by default, while assigned ones only start when their profile is active. This setup means specific services, like those for debugging or development, to be included in a single compose.yml
file and activated only as needed.
Assigning profiles to services
Services are associated with profiles through the
profiles
attribute which takes an
array of profile names:
services:
frontend:
image: frontend
profiles: [frontend]
phpmyadmin:
image: phpmyadmin
depends_on: [db]
profiles: [debug]
backend:
image: backend
db:
image: mysql
Here the services frontend
and phpmyadmin
are assigned to the profiles
frontend
and debug
respectively and as such are only started when their
respective profiles are enabled.
Services without a profiles
attribute are always enabled. In this
case running docker compose up
would only start backend
and db
.
Valid profiles names follow the regex format of [a-zA-Z0-9][a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+
.
Tip
The core services of your application shouldn't be assigned
profiles
so they are always enabled and automatically started.
Start specific profiles
To start a specific profile supply the --profile
command-line option or
use the
COMPOSE_PROFILES
environment variable:
$ docker compose --profile debug up
$ COMPOSE_PROFILES=debug docker compose up
Both commands start the services with the debug
profile enabled.
In the previous compose.yml
file, this starts the services
db
and phpmyadmin
.
Start multiple profiles
You can also enable
multiple profiles, e.g. with docker compose --profile frontend --profile debug up
the profiles frontend
and debug
will be enabled.
Multiple profiles can be specified by passing multiple --profile
flags or
a comma-separated list for the COMPOSE_PROFILES
environment variable:
$ docker compose --profile frontend --profile debug up
$ COMPOSE_PROFILES=frontend,debug docker compose up
If you want to enable all profiles at the same time, you can run docker compose --profile "*"
.
Auto-starting profiles and dependency resolution
When a service with assigned profiles
is explicitly targeted on the command
line its profiles are started automatically so you don't need to start them
manually. This can be used for one-off services and debugging tools.
As an example consider the following configuration:
services:
backend:
image: backend
db:
image: mysql
db-migrations:
image: backend
command: myapp migrate
depends_on:
- db
profiles:
- tools
# Only start backend and db
$ docker compose up -d
# This runs db-migrations (and,if necessary, start db)
# by implicitly enabling the profiles `tools`
$ docker compose run db-migrations
But keep in mind that docker compose
only automatically starts the
profiles of the services on the command line and not of any dependencies.
This means that any other services the targeted service depends_on
should either:
- Share a common profile
- Always be started, by omitting
profiles
or having a matching profile started explicitly
services:
web:
image: web
mock-backend:
image: backend
profiles: ["dev"]
depends_on:
- db
db:
image: mysql
profiles: ["dev"]
phpmyadmin:
image: phpmyadmin
profiles: ["debug"]
depends_on:
- db
# Only start "web"
$ docker compose up -d
# Start mock-backend (and, if necessary, db)
# by implicitly enabling profiles `dev`
$ docker compose up -d mock-backend
# This fails because profiles "dev" is not enabled
$ docker compose up phpmyadmin
Although targeting phpmyadmin
automatically starts the profiles debug
, it doesn't automatically start the profiles required by db
which is dev
.
To fix this you either have to add the debug
profile to the db
service:
db:
image: mysql
profiles: ["debug", "dev"]
or start the dev
profile explicitly:
# Profiles "debug" is started automatically by targeting phpmyadmin
$ docker compose --profile dev up phpmyadmin
$ COMPOSE_PROFILES=dev docker compose up phpmyadmin
Stop specific profiles
As with starting specific profiles, you can use the --profile
command-line option or
use the
COMPOSE_PROFILES
environment variable:
$ docker compose --profile debug down
$ COMPOSE_PROFILES=debug docker compose down
Both commands stop and remove services with the debug
profile. In the following compose.yml
file, this stops the services db
and phpmyadmin
.
services:
frontend:
image: frontend
profiles: [frontend]
phpmyadmin:
image: phpmyadmin
depends_on: [db]
profiles: [debug]
backend:
image: backend
db:
image: mysql
Note
Running
docker compose down
only stopsbackend
anddb
.