docker-compose up for only certain containers

Question

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

Answer 1

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

sudo 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.

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

You can start containers by using:

$ docker-compose up -d client

This will run containers in the background and output will be avaiable from

$ docker-compose logs

and it will consist of all your started containers