docker-compose vs rancher-compose

Question

I'm building now the server with all containerized services and to do that I'm using rancher platform. And here I have a choice: prefer to use docker-compose.yml or rancher-compose.yml to deploy my server with all services. So what the differences are between these files? (would be nice to see listed prons and cons of each one)

Answer 1

rancher-compose has been there before docker-compose had all the swarm / scale / deploy feature it has with docker-compose v3 nowdays.

That said, the importance of rancher-compose has been a bit less nowdays, consider that it has offered the features for a far longer time then docker-compose has done - so it served its need.

Nevertheless rancher-compose still offers unique features over docker-Compose, if you deploy on a rancher enabled stack, which in the end will force you to use rancher-compose whenever you have rancher.

It makes you define health checks more easily, the scaling of the services and all that ( some of the features are not implemented by docker-compose yet) - e.g. like the questions to get the service up and running with dynamic values without using somehthing like dotenv (can be used on the cli or using catalogs in the UI ). But more then that, rancher-compose is not swarm specific, its agnostic - thus can also be used with kubernetes - which docker-compose cannot ( swarm specific ).

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So bottom line is, historically rancher-compose was offering features, docker-compose was not offering at the time ( until v3 ), nowdays rancher-compose is different since it is docker-cloud unspecific ( can support swarm / kubernetes ) and also has some unique features, especially when using with rancher.