Hi everyone!

Last week I was searching how to manage multiple development environments with the same docker-compose configuration for my Django workflow. I needed to manage a development and a production environment, so this is what I did.

Some descriptions on my data:

1. I had around 20 env vars, but some of them where shared among environments.
2. I wanted to do it with as little impact as possible.

First, docker-compose help command

The first thing I did was run a simple docker-compose --help, and it returned this:

Define and run multi-container applications with Docker.

Usage:
  docker-compose [-f <arg>...] [options] [COMMAND] [ARGS...]
  docker-compose -h|--help

Options:
  -f, --file FILE             Specify an alternate compose file
                              (default: docker-compose.yml)
# more not necessary stuff
  --env-file PATH             Specify an alternate environment file

I went with the -f flag, because I also wanted to run some docker images for development. By using the -f flag I could create a base compose file with the shared env vars (docker-compose.yml) and another one for each of the environments (prod.yml and dev.yml)

So I went to town. I kept the shared variables inside docker-compose.yml and added the specific variables and configuration to prod.yml and dev.yml

docker-compose.yml:

version: "3"

services:
  app:
    build:
      context: .
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    volumes:
      - ./app:/app
    command: >
      sh -c "python manage.py migrate && python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000"      
    environment:
      - myvar1=myvar1
      - myvar2=myvar2
      ...
      - myvarx=myvarx

Since I’m going to connect to a remote RDS and a remote Redis, in my prod.yml, I don’t need to define a Postgres or Redis image:

version: "3"
services:
  app:
    environment:
      # DB connections
      - DB_HOST=my-host
      - DB_NAME=db-name
      - DB_USER=db-user
      - DB_PASS=mysupersecurepassword
      ...

For dev.yml I added the Postgres database image and Redis image:

version: "3"

services:
  app:
    depends_on:
      - db
      - redis
    environment:
      # Basics
      - DEBUG=True
      # DB connections
      - DB_HOST=db
      - DB_NAME=app
      - DB_USER=postgres
      - DB_PASS=supersecretpassword
      ...
  db:
    image: postgres:10-alpine
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_DB=app
      - POSRGRES_USER=postgres
      - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=supersecretpassword
    links:
      - redis:redis

  redis:
    image: redis:5.0.7
    expose:
      - "6379"

And to run it between environments, all I have to do is:

# For production
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f prod.yml up 

# For development
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f dev.yml up 

That’s it! I have multiple docker-compose files for all my environments, but I could go even further.

Improving the solution

Improving the base docker-compose.yml file

I liked the way it looked, but I knew I could go deeper. A bunch of vars inside the base docker-compose.yml looked weird, and made the file a little unreadable. So again, I went to the docker-compose documentation and found what I needed: env files in docker-compose.

So I created a file called globals.env, and moved all the global env vars to that file:

myvar1=myvar1
mivar2=myvar2
...

And on the docker-compose.yml file I called the globals.env file:

  app:
    env_file: globals.env

This is the final result:

version: "3"

services:
  app:
    build:
      context: .
    ports:
      - "8000:8000"
    volumes:
      - ./app:/app
    command: >
      sh -c "python manage.py migrate && python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000"      
    env_file: globals.env

Improving the running command

As I mentioned before, I wanted as little impact as possible, and docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f envfile.yml up was a bit long for me. So I created a couple of bash files to ease the ingestion of docker-compose files:

prod:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Run django as production
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f prod.yml "$@"

dev:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# Run django as development
docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f dev.yml "$@"

The "$@" means “Append all extra arguments here”, so if I ran the dev command with the up -d arguments, the full command would be docker-compose -f docker-compose.yml -f development.yml up -d, so it is exactly what I wanted

A quick permissions management:

chmod +x prod dev 

And now I could run my environments as:

./dev up
./prod up

All good?

I was satisfied with this solution. I could run both environments wherever I want with only one command instead of moving env vars all over the place. I could go even further by moving the environment variables of each file to its own .env file, but I don’t think that’s needed for the time being. At least I like to know that I can do that down the road if it is necessary