Compose: Support for service groups.

[s11k]

Hi,

I have a use-case where I'm starting to develop a docker-compose.yml configuration of 20+ services. I'd like to start grouping similar services together so that I can run docker-compose up on a select group, instead of listing the individual services. What are your thoughts about supporting a groups attribute that supports an array of tags, like:

myservice:
  container_name: myservice
  build: services/myservice
  groups:
    - core
    - web

mydatabase:
  container_name: mydatabase
  build: services/mydatabase
  groups:
    - core
    - web

something_else:
  container_name: somethingelse
  build: services/something_else
  groups:
    - misc

To start myservice and mydatabase, I could run docker-compose up --groups=core, docker-compose up --groups=core,web, etc.

Thanks!

[dnephin]

I personally think this is better handled by splitting the service into separate files (which is already supported by Compose). Then to run a group of services you can run just one of the files.

However this wouldn't support multi-group membership (like the above example).

# Run just the core group
docker-compose -f core.yml up -d
# Run misc
docker-compose -f core.yml -f misc.yaml up -d

[bonaccorsop]

I agree with slnovak, I want to keep my unified docker-compose file to let docker-compose resolve startup dependencies. Dependencies are a good feature but I cannot use them with different docker-compose projects (files). Groups could resolve this scenario maybe...

[jdoubleu]

A temporary workaround would be to define a minimalistic container which immediately stops after starting (e.g. tianon/true) but has dependencies on other containers and thereby forces Docker Composer to start them before.

Example:

myservice:
  container_name: myservice
  build: services/myservice
  groups:
    - core
    - web

mydatabase:
  container_name: mydatabase
  build: services/mydatabase
  groups:
    - core
    - web

something_else:
  container_name: somethingelse
  build: services/something_else
  groups:
    - misc

core:
  image: tianon/true
  restart: "no"
  depends_on:
    - myservice
    - mydatabase

Then run:

$ docker-compose up -d core

[ljay79]

The request makes totally sense to me too.
The start of such composed services group works even without however, how to stop the entire list of containers all at once?

docker-compose -f core.yml up -d
Ok. But doing a stop wont work at all - at least not to me.

docker-compose -f core.yml stop

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