Inconsistent issue when using docker-compose in Bl

Question

I'm having an issue deploying and linking 3 containers using docker-compose in Bluemix / IBM Containers. The compose file I am using has worked and continues to work but it is very inconsistent. When it fails, I get the following response:

Recreating xxxxx_1
Recreating yyyyy_1
Creating zzzzz_1

ERROR: for server  'message'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "docker-compose", line 3, in <module>
  File "compose/cli/main.py", line 64, in main
  File "compose/cli/main.py", line 116, in perform_command
  File "compose/cli/main.py", line 876, in up
  File "compose/project.py", line 416, in up
  File "compose/parallel.py", line 66, in parallel_execute
KeyError: 'message'
Failed to execute script docker-compose

Answer 1

Docker compose does not expose very good error messages (basically, when something happens it's not expecting, you get a weird stacktrace like that). My guess is that it's timing - the default timeouts on compose are expecting local docker (perhaps on very fast computers), so if things don't start very very fast, it sometimes becomes unhappy.

In the Bluemix cloud, the containers have SDN and other setup that can take a bit longer than on local docker, so that "starting very very fast" is not always within what compose expects.

Try doing export COMPOSE_HTTP_TIMEOUT=300 first to bump the timeouts, that should help matters.