docker-compose in production - part 2

Few months ago I shared my experiences with docker-compose in production. Recently I faced another deployment and decided to use the same technique. This time I used it somewhat differently. In this blog post I would like to share the new experiences.

I started by following the process that went so well last time, which summarized to:

But guess what? My digital ocean's droplet has only 512MB of RAM, which are not enough for building the image. The beloved technique couldn't work with my server!

Docker Hub to the rescue

OK. I can't build the image on the server, but I still want to use docker and docker-compose for all of their advantages. The solution will be to build the image somewhere else, upload it to Docker Hub- an open and free repository for docker images - and fetch it from there directly to the server.

There are two ways to upload a docker image to Docker Hub. The first is to link it to your github account and instruct it to build an image whenever you push code to the repository. The second is to build the image locally and push it to the Hub using the docker command line tool. I wished I could choose the first option, but due to memory restrictions the build failed on their build servers similarly to the way it failed on my digital ocean droplet. Therefore, I choose the 2nd option.

With this revised deployment technique there are only two files on the server, the docker-compose.yml file and the "secrets" file. In my first blog post about docker-compose the docker-compose.yml used the current directory as the build path for the image. Now, the full image name on Docker Hub is referenced. Here is my docker-compose.yml file:

web:
  image: nagasaki45/krihelinator_web
  ports:
    - 80:80
  links:
    - db
    - stash
  env_file: ./secrets
  restart: always

db:
  image: postgres
  restart: always

stash:
  image: redis
  restart: always

Summary

Ideally, a server should only serve the application to the clients, and run the necessary infrastructure to support it. Building or compiling a project on the server is possible, but it doesn't have to be that way. With docker and docker-compose based deployments the build can be done on one machine (be it your local machine, Docker Hub's dedicated build servers, or some other continuous integration / delivery server). But it's not only possible, it even simplifies the process a bit as there is no source code involved, and less operations run on the server. Give docker-compose a try, you won't regret it.