Docker Compose Overview

Docker Compose is an open-source tool for managing multi-container applications with Docker. With Docker Compose, you can describe environments using a declarative syntax and Compose will do all of the heavy-lifting to create the environment. Compose also has built-in logic to make updating environments easy and efficient. It's not only useful for deploying pre-built images, though. You can use it during development to easily manage dependencies for projects. If that sounds interesting, you are in the right place!

In this lesson, we’ll go over what Docker Compose is and why you would use it. Then we’ll explore the two parts of Docker Compose: Docker Compose files and the Docker Compose command-line interface. Next, we’ll get into demo-focused lessons beginning with running a web application with Compose. After that, we’ll see how to build images in a development scenario with Compose. Lastly, we’ll see how to use Compose to adapt an application to multiple different environments. In particular, we’ll see how to use Compose to manage an application in development and production.

If you have thoughts or suggestions for this lesson, please contact Cloud Academy at support@cloudacademy.com.

Lesson Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:

• Describe the anatomy of Docker Compose files
• Configure your application using Docker Compose files
• Use the Docker Compose CLI to manage the entire lifecycle of applications
• Build your own images from source code with Docker Compose
• Extend Docker Compose files to adapt applications to multiple environments

Intended Audience

This lesson is for anyone interested in working with Docker, including:

• DevOps Engineers
• Developers
• Cloud Engineers
• Test Engineers

Prerequisites

This is an intermediate-level lesson that assumes:

• You have experience working with Docker
• Some understanding of software development is also beneficial

Resources

The GitHub repo for this lesson can be found here.