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?

  • @Toribor@corndog.socialEnglish
    9•8 months ago

    I moved from compose to using Ansible to deploy containers. The Ansible container config looks almost identical to a compose file but I can also create folders, config files, set permissions, etc.

      • @Toribor@corndog.socialEnglish
        6•8 months ago

        Sure. Below is an example playbook that is fairly similar to how I’m deploying most of my containers.

        This example creates a folder for samba data, creates a config file from a template and then runs the samba container. It even has a handler so that if I make changes to the config file template it will cycle the container for me after deploying the updated config file.

        I usually structure everything as an ansible role which just splits up this sort of playbook into a folder structure instead. ChatGPT did a great job of helping me figure out where to put files and generally just sped up the process of me creating tasks to do common things like setup a cronjob, install a package, or copy files around.

        - name: Run samba
  hosts: servername

  vars:
    samba_data_directory: "/home/me/docker/samba"

  tasks:
  - name: Create samba data directory
    ansible.builtin.file:
      path: "{{ samba_data_directory }}"
      state: directory
      mode: '0755'

  - name: Create samba config from a jinja template file
    ansible.builtin.template:
      src: templates/smb.conf.j2
      dest: "{{ samba_data_directory }}/smb.conf"
      mode: '0644'
    notify: Restart samba container

  - name: Run samba container
    community.docker.docker_container:
      name: samba
      image: dperson/samba
      ports:
        - 445:445
      volumes:
        - "{{ samba_data_directory}}:/etc/samba/"
        - "/home/me/samba_share:/samba_share"
      env:
        TZ: "America/Chicago"
        UID: '1000'
        GUID: '1000'
        USER: "me;mysambapassword"
        WORKERGROUP: "my-samba-workergroup"
      restart_policy: unless-stopped

  handlers:
  - name: Restart samba container
    community.docker.docker_container:
      name: samba
      restart: true