How to name docker-compose files

Question

How do you name your docker-compose.yml files? Is there a convention to follow?

With Dockerfiles <purpose>.Dockerfile seems to work the best being instantly recognized by VSCode and PyCharm.

I like the idea of structuring docker/compose files into folders so that default names could be used, but as far as I know docker can't see files up the tree creating different problems.

Answer 1

According to the -f documentation:

If you don’t provide this flag on the command line, Compose [...] looks for a docker-compose.yml and a docker-compose.override.yml file.

If you don't want to use the -f flag you can use the default name docker-compose.yml and override it with docker-compose.override.yml.

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However, if you use -f, since you'll provide the filename, you can use whatever you want.

I think a good way to name them depending on the environment could be docker-compose.{env}.yml and place them at the top level directory:

• docker-compose.prod.yml
• docker-compose.dev.yml
• docker-compose.test.yml
• docker-compose.staging.yml

And you can use the default docker-compose.yml to define the base configuration that is common to all environments.