Use Compose in production

Table of contents

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.

Modify your Compose file for production

You may need to make changes to your app configuration to make it ready for production. These changes might 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: alwaysto avoid downtime
  • Adding extra services such as a log aggregator

For this reason, consider defining an additional Compose file, for example production.yml, which specifies production-appropriate configuration. This configuration file only needs to include the changes you want to make from the original Compose file. The additional Compose file is then applied over the original compose.yml to create a new configuration.

Once you have a second configuration file, you can use it with the -f option:

$ docker compose -f compose.yml -f production.yml up -d

See Using multiple compose files for a more complete example, and other options.

Deploying changes

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 command rebuilds the image for web and then stops, destroys, and recreates just the web service. The --no-deps flag prevents Compose from also recreating any services which web depends on.

Running Compose on a single server

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. For more information, see pre-defined environment variables.

Once you've set up your environment variables, all the normal docker compose commands work with no further configuration.