Should I use one docker-compose.yml for all my services?

bronzing@lemmy.fmhy.ml to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 49 points –

Hi,

I'm using docker-compose to host all my server services (jellyfin, qbittorrent, sonarr, etc.). I've recently grouped some of them into individual categories and then merged the individual docker-compose.yml file I had for each service into one per category. But is there actually any reason for not keeping them together?

The reason why is I've started configuring homepage and thought to myself "wouldn't it be cool if instead of giving the server IP each time (per configured service in homepage) I'd just use the service name?" (AFAIK this only works if the containers are all in the same file).

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I have a folder that all my docker services are in. Inside the folder is a folder for each discrete service and within that folder is a unique compose file necessary to run the service. Also in the folder is all the storage folders for that service so it's completely portable, move the folder to any server and run it and you're golden. I shut down all the services with a script then I can just tar the whole docker folder and every service and its data is backed up and portable.

In case anyone cares here is my script, I use this for backups or shutting down the server.

#!/bin/bash

logger "Stopping Docker compose services"

services=(/home/user/docker/*)    # This creates an array of the full paths to all subdirs
#the last entry in this array is always blank line, hence the minus 1 in the for loop count below

for ((i=0; i<=(${#services[@]}-1); i++))
do
    docker compose -f ${services[i]}/docker-compose.yml down &
done

#wait for all the background commands to finish
wait

Exactly my setup and for exactly the reasons you mentioned