Thankfully, in the Ansible ecosystem, we have access to the “community.docker_compose” module that provides an automated way of managing the Docker compose projects.
If you are unfamiliar, the Docker Compose is a tool for defining and running the multi-container Docker applications.
Using Ansible’s docker_compose module, we can manage the lifecycle of these applications directly from Ansible playbooks, giving us programmatic control over container orchestration.
This tutorial explores how we can use the Docker Compose module to automate the container orchestration.
Prerequisites:
- Installed Ansible
- Installed Docker and Docker Compose on the target machine
Installing the Docker Collection
The docker_compose module is part of the “community.docker” collection. Therefore, we need to ensure that we have the collection installed before using it.
Examples:
Example 1: Start a Docker Compose Project
If we have a “docker-compose.yml” file that defines the application configuration, we can use this module to start it as follows:
version: '3'
services:
web:
image: nginx:alpine
ports:
- "80:80"
We can use Ansible and the docker_compose module as follows:
- hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Start docker compose project
community.docker.docker_compose:
project_src: ./docker-compose.yml
state: present
Example 2: Stop the Docker Compose Project
To stop the services that are running in the project, we can use the playbook as follows:
- hosts: localhost
tasks:
- name: Stop docker compose project
community.docker.docker_compose:
project_src: ./docker-compose.yml
state: absent
Conclusion
We covered the basics of working with the Ansible docker_compose module to manage the Docker projects. Explore the docs for the module in the following link to learn more:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/community/docker/docker_compose_module.html
