Docker Compose

Docker Compose

“Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. With Compose, you use a YAML file to configure your application’s services. Then, with a single command, you create and start all the services from your configuration.”

To run our entire application together, i.e run all containers parallelly, we need to configure the docker-compose file.

In the main directory of the project, (outside the server/client) create a file named docker-compose.yml . Write these contents into the file.

version: '3.7'

services:
  server:
    build:
      context: ./server
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    image: myapp-server
    container_name: myapp-node-server
    command: /usr/src/app/node_modules/.bin/nodemon server.js
    volumes:
      - ./server/:/usr/src/app
      - /usr/src/app/node_modules
    ports:
      - "5000:5000"
    depends_on:
      - mongo
    env_file: ./server/.env
    environment:
      - NODE_ENV=development
    networks:
      - app-network
  mongo:
    image: mongo
    volumes:
      - data-volume:/data/db
    ports:
      - "27017:27017"
    networks:
      - app-network
  client:
    build:
      context: ./client
      dockerfile: Dockerfile
    image: myapp-client
    container_name: myapp-react-client
    command: npm start
    volumes:
      - ./client/:/usr/app
      - /usr/app/node_modules
    depends_on:
      - server
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"
    networks:
      - app-network

networks:
    app-network:
        driver: bridge

volumes:
    data-volume:
    node_modules:
    web-root:
      driver: local

Creating the Build To create the build for the entire application, we need to run the following command: docker-compose build

Starting the Services We can start the multi-container system using the following simple command: docker-compose up

At last, we can open http://localhost:3000 to see our React Frontend.

The backend server is live on http://localhost:5000

And MongoDB is running on http://localhost:27017

Maintenance & Inspection

We can inspect running services using the docker-compose ps command.

The docker-compose logs will dump logs of all the running services.

Stopping the containers

To stop all the services, we use docker-compose stop.

Using docker-compose down --volumes brings everything down, removing the containers entirely, with the data volume of the services.