Compose as a Team Workflow

Why Teams Standardize on Compose

Onboarding: git clone && docker compose up replaces a 3-page setup wiki
Review: infrastructure changes show up in diffs like code changes
Parity: dev runs the same stack shape as CI and (small-scale) production

Environment-specific config comes from env files, not edits:

  api:
    image: orders-api:${TAG:-latest}
    env_file: .env
    environment:
      DB_HOST: db

Useful commands beyond up/down:

Command	Does
`docker compose up -d --build`	rebuild images that changed, then up
`docker compose restart web`	restart one service
`docker compose exec web sh`	shell into a running service
`docker compose config`	print the fully-resolved file (great for debugging YAML)
`docker compose pull`	update all images

Note: Compose is perfect up to "a handful of services on one host." The moment you need multi-host scheduling, self-healing and rolling deploys, that's Kubernetes - a different track, same mental models you're building here.

Goal: The Declare the Stack lab gives you the requirements doc; you write the compose file and bring up web + redis with volumes, ports and restart policies.