How to fail loudly during docker-compose up -d?

Question

Using docker-compose up -d, when one of my containers fails to start (i.e. the RUN command exits with an error code), it fails quietly - How can I make it fail loudly?

(Am I thinking about this the right way? My ultimate goal is using Docker for my development environment. I'd like to be able to spin up my environment and be informed of errors right away. I'd like to stay to Docker's true path as much as possible, and am hesitant to depend on additional tools like screen/tmux)

Answer 1

Since you are running it detached (-d), docker-compose only spawns the containers and exits, without monitoring for any issues. If you run the containers in the foreground with:

docker-compose up --abort-on-container-exit

That should give you a pretty clear error on any container problems. Otherwise, I'd recommend looking into some of the other more advanced schedulers that monitor the running containers to recover from failures (e.g. Universal Control Plane or Kubernetes).

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Update: If you want to script something outside of the docker-compose up -d, you can do a

docker events -f "container=${compose_prefix}_" -f "event=die"

and if anything gets output there, you had a container go down. There's also docker-compose events | grep "container die".