Visual Studio 2017 stopped running docker-compose

Question

In Visual Studio 2017 I am working on a project with 3 dotnet core projects. It was building and starting the containers using docker-compose as the startup project. Now it is giving me an error that it cannot find the container starting with a given name. In the Output window in the Show output from: docker selected it shows the combined docker-compose.yml files.

It appears that it is not building the containers, hence why it cannot find the container it is looking for by name. After seeing this I ran all the docker commands in PowerShell and it built the images and started the containers right up. With the containers in place Visual Studio started, but gave me a different error.

I'm wondering why Visual Studio would not be building the containers anymore.

Note: I have had trouble in the past when spinning up the containers using docker cli that Visual Studio would throw exceptions, but I have cleaned docker running containers, network, volume, and images...

Thanks for your help in advance. I am loving docker, but there are some frustrations when using the VS tools thus far...

Answer 1

In my case I had Resharper's build enabled, which confused Visual Studio. Switching to normal Visual Studio build in Resharper -> Options -> Tools -> Build solved the problem for me.

It also helps sometimes to right-click on the docker-compose item in Visual Studio, then choosing "Clean". This causes Visual Studio to call docker-compose kill, giving you a fresh slate. Note that the output from this process appears in the "Build" window, not the "Docker" one.

Answer 2

Make sure that in Build > Configuration Manager that you have the Docker project set to build in Debug mode - this being unticked caused this issue for me and re-ticking it proved to be the solution.