compose/docs/production.md

page_title: Using Compose in production page_description: Guide to using Docker Compose in production page_keywords: documentation, docs, docker, compose, orchestration, containers, production

Using Compose in production

While Compose is not yet considered production-ready, you can try using it for production deployments if you're feeling brave. Production-readiness is an active, ongoing project - see the roadmap for details on how it's coming along and what needs to be done.

When deploying to production, you'll almost certainly want to make changes to your app configuration that are more appropriate to a live environment. This may include:

• Removing any volume bindings for application code, so that code stays inside the container and can't be changed from outside
• Binding to different ports on the host
• Setting environment variables differently (e.g. to decrease the verbosity of logging, or to enable email sending)
• Specifying a restart policy (e.g. restart: always) to avoid downtime
• Adding extra services (e.g. a log aggregator)

For this reason, you'll probably want to define a separate Compose file, say production.yml, which specifies production-appropriate configuration.

Once you've got an alternate configuration file, you can make Compose use it by setting the COMPOSE_FILE environment variable:

$ COMPOSE_FILE=production.yml
$ docker-compose up -d

Note: You can also use the file for a one-off command without setting an environment variable by passing the -f flag, e.g. docker-compose -f production.yml up -d.

Deploying changes

When you make changes to your app code, you'll need to rebuild your image and recreate your app containers. If the service you want to redeploy is called web, this will look like:

$ docker-compose build web
$ docker-compose up --no-deps -d web

This will first rebuild the image for web and then stop, destroy and recreate just the web service. The --no-deps flag prevents Compose from also recreating any services which web depends on.

Run Compose on a single server

You can use Compose to deploy an app to a remote Docker host by setting the DOCKER_HOST, DOCKER_TLS_VERIFY and DOCKER_CERT_PATH environment variables appropriately. Docker Machine makes managing local and remote Docker hosts very easy, and is recommended even if you're not deploying remotely.

Once you've set up your environment variables, all the normal docker-compose commands will work with no extra configuration.

Run Compose on a Swarm cluster

Docker Swarm, a Docker-native clustering system, exposes the same API as a single Docker host, which means you can use Compose against a Swarm instance and run your apps across multiple hosts.

Compose/Swarm integration is still in the experimental stage, and Swarm is still in beta, but if you're interested to try it out, check out the integration guide.