For the last two years, I've been treating compose files as individual runners for individual programs.
Then I brainstormed the concept of having one singular docker-compose file that writes out every single running container on my system… (that can use compose), each install starts at the same root directory and volumes branch out from there.
Then I find out, this is how most people use compose. One compose file, with volumes and directories branching out from wherever ./ is called.
THEN I FIND OUT… that most people that discover this move their installations to podman because compose works on different versions per app and calling those versions breaks the concept of having one singular docker-compose.yml file and podman doesn't need a version for compose files.
Is there some meta for the best way to handle these apps collectively?
This. And I recently found out you can also use
includesin compose v2.20+, so if your stack complexity demands it, you can have a small top-level docker-compose.yml with includes to smaller compose files, per service or any other criteria you want.https://docs.docker.com/compose/multiple-compose-files/include/
I prefer compose merge because my "downstream" services can propagate their depends/networks to things that depend on them up the stream
There's an env variables you set in .env so it's similar to include
The one thing I prefer about include is that each include directory can have its own .env file, which merges with the first level .env. With merge it seems you're stuck with one .env file for all in-file substitutes