Docker Compose Setup

This skill enables the agent to design and configure multi-container application stacks using Docker Compose. The agent can orchestrate services including web servers, databases, caches, background workers, and reverse proxies with proper networking, volume management, health checks, and environment-specific overrides. The agent understands both development and production configurations and can generate compose files that follow Docker best practices.

Workflow

1. Analyze the Application Stack: The agent reviews the project's architecture to identify all required services and their dependencies. This includes the primary application container, databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB), caches (Redis, Memcached), message queues (RabbitMQ, Kafka), background workers, and reverse proxies (Nginx, Traefik). The agent maps inter-service dependencies to determine startup order and health check requirements.

2. Define Services and Images: For each service, the agent specifies the Docker image or build context, exposed ports, environment variables, and resource constraints. Application services typically use a build directive pointing to a local Dockerfile, while infrastructure services use official images with pinned version tags. The agent avoids using latest tags in production to ensure reproducible deployments.

3. Configure Networking and Service Discovery: The agent creates named Docker networks to isolate traffic between service tiers (e.g., a frontend network for the proxy and app, a backend network for the app and database). Services communicate using their compose service names as DNS hostnames, eliminating the need for hardcoded IP addresses.

4. Set Up Volumes and Persistence: The agent defines named volumes for data that must persist across container restarts, such as database storage and file uploads. For development, bind mounts map the host source code into containers to enable hot reloading. The agent ensures that volume permissions and ownership are configured correctly for the container's runtime user.

5. Add Health Checks and Dependency Ordering: The agent configures health checks for critical services so that dependent services wait until their dependencies are truly ready, not just started. This prevents common issues like an application container crashing because the database has started but is not yet accepting connections. The depends_on directive with condition: service_healthy enforces correct startup order.

6. Create Environment-Specific Overrides: The agent generates a base docker-compose.yml for shared configuration and an override file (docker-compose.override.yml for development, docker-compose.prod.yml for production) to customize settings per environment. Development overrides include bind mounts, debug ports, and verbose logging, while production overrides include resource limits, restart policies, and optimized logging drivers.

Supported Technologies