[docker] docker-compose up for only certain containers

I have a docker-compose.yml which contain several containers. Three of them are for my app (client, server and database) and the rest are for various dev tools (e.g. psql, npm, manage.py, etc). When I do docker-compose up all of them are started, but I only want the three main ones to start. Because of the links I've specified, I can start just those three with docker-compose up client but then the output is only from that one container. So, is there a way to do one of the following:

1. Tell docker-compose which containers should by started by docker-compose up
2. Get output from all linked containers from docker-compose up client

Update

Starting with docker-compose 1.28.0 the new service profiles are just made for that! With profiles you can mark services to be only started in specific profiles:

services:
  client:
    # ...
  db:
    # ...
  npm:
    profiles: ["cli-only"]
    # ...

docker-compose up # start main services, no npm
docker-compose run --rm npm # run npm service
docker-compose --profile cli-only # start main and all "cli-only" services

original answer

Since docker-compose v1.5 it is possible to pass multiple docker-compose.yml files with the -f flag. This allows you to split your dev tools into a separate docker-compose.yml which you then only include on-demand:

# start and attach to all your essential services
docker-compose up

# execute a defined command in docker-compose.dev.yml
docker-compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml run npm update

# if your command depends_on a service you need to include both configs
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.dev.yml run npm update

For an in-depth discussion on this see docker/compose#1896.

One good solution is to run only desired services like this:

docker-compose up --build $(<services.txt)

and services.txt file look like this:

services1 services2, etc

of course if dependancy (depends_on), need to run related services together.

--build is optional, just for example.

To start a particular service defined in your docker-compose file. for example if your have a docker-compose.yml

docker-compose start db  

given a compose file like as:

version: '3.3'

services:
   db:
     image: mysql:5.7
     ports:
       - "3306:3306"
     volumes:
       - ./db_data:/var/lib/mysql
     restart: always
     environment:
       MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: yourPassword
       MYSQL_DATABASE: wordpress
       MYSQL_USER: wordpress
       MYSQL_PASSWORD: yourPassword

   wordpress:
     depends_on:
       - db
     image: wordpress:latest
     ports:
       - "80:80"
     volumes:
       - ./l3html:/var/www/html
     restart: always
     environment:
       WORDPRESS_DB_HOST: db:3306
       WORDPRESS_DB_USER: wordpress
       WORDPRESS_DB_PASSWORD: yourPassword
volumes:
    db_data:
    l3html:

Some times you want to start mySQL only (sometimes you just want to populate a database) before you start your entire suite.

You usually don't want to do this. With Docker Compose you define services that compose your app. npm and manage.py are just management commands. You don't need a container for them. If you need to, say create your database tables with manage.py, all you have to do is:

docker-compose run client python manage.py create_db

Think of it as the one-off dynos Heroku uses.

If you really need to treat these management commands as separate containers (and also use Docker Compose for these), you could create a separate .yml file and start Docker Compose with the following command:

docker-compose up -f my_custom_docker_compose.yml

I actually had a very similar challenge on my current project. That broght me to the idea of writing a small script which I called docker-compose-profile (or short: dcp). I published this today on GitLab as docker-compose-profile. So in short: I now can start several predefined docker-compose profiles using a command like dcp -p some-services "up -d". Feel free to try it out and give some feedback or suggestions for further improvements.

You can use the run command and specify your services to run. Be careful, the run command does not expose ports to the host. You should use the flag --service-ports to do that if needed.

docker-compose run --service-ports client server database

Oh, just with this:

$ docker-compose up client server database