Docker-Compose: how to wait for other service to be ready?

Question

I have the following docker-compose, where I need to wait for the service jhipster-registry to be up and accepting connections before starting myprogram-app.

I tried the healtcheck way, following the official doc https://docs.docker.com/compose/compose-file/compose-file-v2/

version: '2.1'
services:
    myprogram-app:
        image: myprogram
        mem_limit: 1024m
        environment:
            - SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=prod,swagger
            - EUREKA_CLIENT_SERVICE_URL_DEFAULTZONE=http://admin:$${jhipster.registry.password}@jhipster-registry:8761/eureka
            - SPRING_CLOUD_CONFIG_URI=http://admin:$${jhipster.registry.password}@jhipster-registry:8761/config
            - SPRING_DATASOURCE_URL=jdbc:postgresql://myprogram-postgresql:5432/myprogram
            - JHIPSTER_SLEEP=0
            - SPRING_DATA_ELASTICSEARCH_CLUSTER_NODES=myprogram-elasticsearch:9300
            - JHIPSTER_REGISTRY_PASSWORD=53bqDrurQAthqrXG
            - EMAIL_USERNAME
            - EMAIL_PASSWORD
        ports:
            - 8080:8080
        networks:
          - backend
        depends_on:
          - jhipster-registry:
              "condition": service_started
          - myprogram-postgresql
          - myprogram-elasticsearch
    myprogram-postgresql:
        image: postgres:9.6.5
        mem_limit: 256m
        environment:
            - POSTGRES_USER=myprogram
            - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=myprogram
        networks:
          - backend
    myprogram-elasticsearch:
        image: elasticsearch:2.4.6
        mem_limit: 512m
        networks:
          - backend
    jhipster-registry:
        extends:
            file: jhipster-registry.yml
            service: jhipster-registry
        mem_limit: 512m
        ports:
            - 8761:8761
        networks:
          - backend
        healthcheck:
          test: "exit 0"
networks:
  backend:
    driver: "bridge"

but I get the following error when running docker-compose up:

ERROR: The Compose file './docker-compose.yml' is invalid because:
services.myprogram-app.depends_on contains {"jhipster-registry": {"condition": "service_started"}}, which is an invalid type, it should be a string

Am I doing something wrong, or this feature is no more supported? How to achieve this sync between services?

Updated version

version: '2.1'
services:
    myprogram-app:
        image: myprogram
        mem_limit: 1024m
        environment:
            - SPRING_PROFILES_ACTIVE=prod,swagger
            - EUREKA_CLIENT_SERVICE_URL_DEFAULTZONE=http://admin:$${jhipster.registry.password}@jhipster-registry:8761/eureka
            - SPRING_CLOUD_CONFIG_URI=http://admin:$${jhipster.registry.password}@jhipster-registry:8761/config
            - SPRING_DATASOURCE_URL=jdbc:postgresql://myprogram-postgresql:5432/myprogram
            - JHIPSTER_SLEEP=0
            - SPRING_DATA_ELASTICSEARCH_CLUSTER_NODES=myprogram-elasticsearch:9300
            - JHIPSTER_REGISTRY_PASSWORD=53bqDrurQAthqrXG
            - EMAIL_USERNAME
            - EMAIL_PASSWORD
        ports:
            - 8080:8080
        networks:
          - backend
        depends_on:
          jhipster-registry:
            condition: service_healthy
          myprogram-postgresql:
            condition: service_started
          myprogram-elasticsearch:
            condition: service_started
        #restart: on-failure
    myprogram-postgresql:
        image: postgres:9.6.5
        mem_limit: 256m
        environment:
            - POSTGRES_USER=myprogram
            - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=tuenemreh
        networks:
          - backend
    myprogram-elasticsearch:
        image: elasticsearch:2.4.6
        mem_limit: 512m
        networks:
          - backend
    jhipster-registry:
        extends:
            file: jhipster-registry.yml
            service: jhipster-registry
        mem_limit: 512m
        ports:
            - 8761:8761
        networks:
          - backend
        healthcheck:
          test: ["CMD", "curl", "-f", "http://jhipster-registry:8761", "|| exit 1"]
          interval: 30s
          retries: 20
          #start_period: 30s
networks:
  backend:
    driver: "bridge"

The updated version gives me a different error,

ERROR: for myprogram-app  Container "8ebca614590c" is unhealthy.
ERROR: Encountered errors while bringing up the project.

saying that the container of jhipster-registry is unhealthy, but it's reachable via browser. How can I fix the command in the healthcheck to make it work?

Answer 1

The documentation suggests that, in Docker Compose version 2 files specifically, depends_on: can be a list of strings, or a mapping where the keys are service names and the values are conditions. For the services where you don't have (or need) health checks, there is a service_started condition.

depends_on:
  # notice: these lines don't start with "-"
  jhipster-registry:
    condition: service_healthy
  myprogram-postgresql:
    condition: service_started
  myprogram-elasticsearch:
    condition: service_started

Depending on how much control you have over your program and its libraries, it's better still if you can arrange for the service to be able to start without its dependencies necessarily being available (equivalently, to function if its dependencies die while the service is running), and not use the depends_on: option. You might return an HTTP 503 Service Unavailable error if the database is down, for instance. Another strategy that often is helpful is to immediately exit if your dependencies aren't available but use a setting like restart: on-error to ask the orchestrator to restart the service.