Well I knew that one can have multiple services within a compose file and refer to a service from another using its name. But I didn’t know that it was super easy to do it between multiple compose files too. Especially if you are using compose file version 3.5 or above. Here’s how:
Let’s say we have a docker-compose.yml file like this:
version: "3.6"
services:
frontend:
build: ./frontend/
ports:
- "4200:4200"
backend:
build: ./backend/
ports:
- "4001:4001"
And let’s say we’d like the backend to communicate with a db service defined in another docker-compose.yml file. This is how we can achieve it:
First, we have to specify a network for the communication to take place. We can do this by specifying the networks key in the YAML file with a reference name and a network name.
networks:
db_net:
name: db_network
Here, db_net is the local reference name which we can use within the compose file to refer to it. db_network will be the actual name of the network being created.
We can now attach this network to our backend like so:
version: "3.6"
services:
frontend:
build: ./frontend/
ports:
- "4200:4200"
environment:
- NODE_ENV=production
restart: always
backend:
build: ./backend/
ports:
- "4001:4001"
networks:
- db_net
networks:
db_net:
name: db_network
This would create the services and the network and attach the network to the specified service.
Now, in the other compose file, let’s say we have a structure like this:
version: "3.6"
services:
db:
build: .
ports:
- 5001:5001
We can now attach this to the same db_network by modifying it like this:
version: "3.6"
services:
db:
build: .
ports:
- 5001:5001
networks:
- db_netw
networks:
db_netw:
external:
name: db_network
It’s very similar to the first setup except now we’ve to specify that the network is external by giving the name under the external key.
Docker would automatically attach this cluster to the db_network created by the previous cluster.
Now we can start both clusters and refer to the services with their names in our app URLs.
Simple, isn’t it?