docker-compose Getting started with docker-compose Docker Compose hello world

Example

A very basic docker-compose.yml looks like this:

version: '2'
services:
  hello_world:
    image: ubuntu
    command: [/bin/echo, 'Hello world']

This file is making it so that there's a hello_world service, that's initialized from the ubuntu:latest image and that, when it's run, it just runs echo 'Hello world'

If you're on the folder directory (and it contains this docker-compose.yml file), you can do docker-compose up and you should see

Creating folder_hello_world_1
Attaching to folder_hello_world_1
hello_world_1 | Hello world
folder_hello_world_1 exited with code 0

This created the container from the ubuntu image, and ran the command that was specified on the docker-compose.yml

Docker-Compose uses the folder name as the project name to prefix containers and networks. To set another project name, you can either call docker-compose --project-name NAME {up|down|...} or you suppy a file called .env next to your docker-compose.yml and write COMPOSE_PROJECT_NAME=name in it. Better avoid long project names with hyphens (-) because docker compose bahaves strange with this kind of names.

Note: docker-compose allows you to run multiple docker containers on a single host. If you want to run multiple containers on more than one node, please refer to solution such as swarm / kubernetes.