How to run docker-compose on remote host?

Question

I have compose file locally. How to run bundle of containers on remote host like docker-compose up -d with DOCKER_HOST=<some ip>?

Answer 1

After the release of Docker 18.09.0 and the (as of now) upcoming docker-compose v1.23.1 release this will get a whole lot easier. This mentioned Docker release added support for the ssh protocol to the DOCKER_HOST environment variable and the -H argument to docker ... commands respectively. The next docker-compose release will incorporate this feature as well.

First of all, you'll need SSH access to the target machine (which you'll probably need with any approach).

Then, either:

# Re-direct to remote environment. export DOCKER_HOST="ssh://my-user@remote-host"  # Run your docker-compose commands. docker-compose pull docker-compose down docker-compose up  # All docker-compose commands here will be run on remote-host.  # Switch back to your local environment. unset DOCKER_HOST 

Or, if you prefer, all in one go for one command only:

docker-compose -H "ssh://my-user@remote-host" up 

One great thing about this is that all your local environment variables that you might use in your docker-compose.yml file for configuration are available without having to transfer them over to remote-host in some way.

Answer 2

If you don't need to run docker container on your local machine, but still on the same remote machine, you can change this in your docker setting.

On the local machine: You can control remote host with -H parameter

docker -H tcp://remote:2375 pull ubuntu 

To use it with docker-compose, you should add this parameter in /etc/default/docker

On the remote machine

You should change listen from external adress and not only unix socket.

See Bind Docker to another host/port or a Unix socket for more details.

If you need to run container on multiple remote hoste, you should configure Docker Swarm