How to docker-compose up only for services?

Question

In my docker-compose.yml file I have plenty of services:

• nginx
• mysql
• redis
• echo
• php
• ...

But also some CLI utilities that I use with docker-compose run --rm:

• artisan
• composer
• npm
• ...

When I start my system I do docker-compose up. Unfortunately this also try to start all the CLI utilities. Is there a way to separate these two categories in my docker-compose?

Answer 1

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:
  nginx:
    # ...
  mysql:
    # ...
  composer:
    profiles: ["cli-only"]
    # ...
    # ...
  npm:
    profiles: ["cli-only"]
    # ...

docker-compose up # start main services, no composer and no npm
docker-compose run --rm composer
docker-compose run --rm npm

---

original answer

Unfortunately there is currently no convenient way to do this. The officially recommended way to do it is to separate your commands into its own docker-compose.yml:

# start all your services
docker-compose up

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

# if your command depends_on a service you need to merge the configs
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.cli.yml run npm update

Specifying multiple docker-compose.yml files with the -f flag will merge them together, see the documentation. This allows you to depend on services/networks/volumes which are defined in another file.

For an in-depth discussion on the whole issue see docker/compose#1896.