Using docker-compose with GELF log driver

Question

According to the official Docker docs, it is possible to get the stdout and stderr output of a container as GELF messages which is a format that is understood by e.g. Graylog / Graylog2 and logstash.

This works fine when I run my containers manually from the command line. For instance,

docker run --log-driver=gelf --log-opt gelf-address=udp://localhost:12201 busybox echo This is my  message.

will send a log message to my Graylog2 server running on localhost which has a UDP input listener configured at port 12201.

Now, I want to use the same log options with docker-compose which, according to the docs, should be possible in principle. However, the docs do not mention any log formats but json-file, syslog and none and when I include something like

my-container:
  container_name: ...
  build: ...
  ports: ...
  log_driver: "gelf"
  log_opt:
    gelf-address: "udp://localhost:12201"

in my docker-compose.yml file then docker-compose up fails with:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 3, in <module>
  File "/code/build/docker-compose/out00-PYZ.pyz/compose.cli.main", line 39, in main
  File "/code/build/docker-compose/out00-PYZ.pyz/compose.cli.docopt_command", line 21, in sys_dispatch
  File "/code/build/docker-compose/out00-PYZ.pyz/compose.cli.command", line 27, in dispatch
  File "/code/build/docker-compose/out00-PYZ.pyz/compose.cli.docopt_command", line 24, in dispatch
  File "/code/build/docker-compose/out00-PYZ.pyz/compose.cli.command", line 59, in perform_command
  File "/code/build/docker-compose/out00-PYZ.pyz/compose.cli.main", line 495, in up
  File "/code/build/docker-compose/out00-PYZ.pyz/compose.project", line 265, in up
  File "/code/build/docker-compose/out00-PYZ.pyz/compose.service", line 369, in execute_convergence_plan
  File "/code/build/docker-compose/out00-PYZ.pyz/compose.service", line 270, in create_container
  File "/code/build/docker-compose/out00-PYZ.pyz/compose.service", line 643, in _get_container_create_options
  File "/code/build/docker-compose/out00-PYZ.pyz/compose.service", line 656, in _get_container_host_config
  File "/code/build/docker-compose/out00-PYZ.pyz/docker.utils.types", line 27, in __init__
ValueError: LogConfig.type must be one of (json-file, syslog, none)

For the record, this was on docker-compose 1.4.0 and docker 1.8.1, build d12ea79.

Apparently, Docker and docker-compose are not at the same level of implementation here. I just found that this has already been solved and included in the Master branch on Github, see https://github.com/docker/compose/issues/1869 and https://github.com/docker/docker-py/pull/724 .

Is there any way to either re-install docker-compose from the current Master branch or to add this to an existing installation manually? I could not find the file where the commit goes to anywhere on my host...

Answer 1

For Docker-Compose v2 services, the syntax has changed slightly, it's all under a new "logging" section now:

version: "2"

services:
  example:
    container_name: example
    image: debian:wheezy
    command: /bin/sh -c "while true; do date && echo "hello"; sleep 1; done"
    ports:
      - "1234:1234"
    logging:
      driver: "gelf"
      options:
        gelf-address: "udp://graylog.example.com:12201"
        tag: "first-logs"

One important note: The address for gelf-address needs to be the external address of the server, as Docker resolves this address through the host's network.

Answer 2

The issue has been fixed.

I have just tested logging to graylog2 using docker-compose 1.5.0rc2

You can try with this working example yaml:

example:
 container_name: example
 image: debian:wheezy
   command: /bin/sh -c "while true; do date && echo "hello"; sleep 1; done"
 ports:
  - "1234:1234"
 log_driver: "gelf"
 log_opt:
   gelf-address: "udp://graylog.example.com:12201"
   gelf-tag: "first-logs"

When container starts there is a warning

example | WARNING: no logs are available with the 'gelf' log driver

But it does not seem to affect that messages are sent to graylog.