Compose: Add labels in docker-compose up

Created on 28 Aug 2018 · 5Comments · Source: docker/compose

Currently all CLI (docker or docker-compose) commands have the possibility to overwrite via the switch -l or --label the labels of the services/containers to run or volumes/networks to create. The docker-compose up does not have such an option.

See for example Add labels in docker-compose run #4937 where such an option was added for docker-compose run

One Use case

If we start a docker-compose stack on a swarm multiple times, then different labels can be used to identify the started services/containers.
Adding the labels at command line level would free us from knowing any insights of what we started and free us from changing the compose file.
We can for example run several docker-compose stacks multiple times in a CI test scenario. On an error situation we can simply enforce by filtering by labels that what ever had been tested (container, services, volumes, networks, etc.) is removed from the swarm.

Version

docker-compose version 1.22.0, build f46880fe
docker-py version: 3.4.1
CPython version: 3.6.6
OpenSSL version: OpenSSL 1.0.2o  27 Mar 2018

areup kinfeature

Source

xlf12

👍13

Most helpful comment

Is there really no way to assign a label using docker-compose? Came here looking how to do it since I have some filters on labels that I would like to assign to a docker-compose stack. Would really like this functionality.

emmm-dee on 17 Apr 2019

👍6

All 5 comments

I would be very happy if I could take care of it, but I need information from the maintainer, if anyone is already working on it. And if you want, give me some hints.

jewertow on 8 Nov 2018

@jewertow It may be helpful to look at this MR: https://github.com/docker/compose/pull/5397 which implemented the label for docker-compose run.

In the meantime, and as a workaround, you can pass a label using an environment variable and variable substitution in the docker-compose file.

bkanuka on 15 Nov 2018

Well, yeah, fine. I didn't think to do it that way. It's a workaround. Although the command-line version would be nice, as it doesn't force us to write our composed files for specific use cases.

xlf12 on 16 Nov 2018

👍2

emmm-dee on 17 Apr 2019

👍6

Just hit this issue in 2020, could this year get any worse? My use case is I want to be able to automatically clean up resources created by a given docker-compose. To achieve this I want to tag all resources (containers/volumes/networks) with a given label so I can track and remove them later, something like docker-compose -l custom=true up would be great